A'KENSIDE, MARK, an author of considerable celebrity, in his own day, on account of his didactic poem, The Pleasures of the Imagination, and some medical works. lie was b. Nov. 9, 1721, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, where his father was a butcher. Being intended for the Presbyterian church, he was sent to study theology at Edinburgh, but soon abandoned it for that of medicine. He graduated as a physician at Leyden in 1744, and practiced at Northampton, then at Hampstead, and finally in London. His success as a practicing physician was never very great, owing, it is said, to his haughty and pedantic manner. Ile d. in London (June 23, 1770), soon after being appointed one of the physicians to the queen. At Leyden he had formed an intimacy with Jeremiah Dyson, and this rich and generous friend allowed him £300 a year. Some of his medical treatises, as those on the lymphatic vessels and on dysentery, possess considerable merit. His later poetry, consisting chiefly of odes and hymns, did not attain the same reputation as his Pleasures of the Imagination, which was written in his twenty-third year, and to which is owing whatever celebrity has attached to his name. Dyson published hiS
poetic works in 1772, and another edition appeared in 1807. In Peregrine Pickle, Smollett has satirically sketched the character of A. under that of the pedant who undertakes to give an entertainment after the manner of the ancients. A. has little originality of conception, or even of expression; the reader is carried along for a time by the evident enthusiasm of the poet, and rapid and stately march of lofty images and ideas; but, as it has been well expressed, "all is operose, cumbrous, and cloudy, with abundance of gay coloring and well-sounding words, but filling the eye oftener than the imagination, and the ear oftener than either." ' A. became dissatisfied with his juvenile production, and at his death had written a portion of a new poem on the same subject. Both poems were published in the complete edition of his works, Lend., 1773. His life has been written by Bucke: Li.fe,Writings, and Genius of A. (Svo, Lond., 1832).