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Updated: June 18, 2025
The general rule undoubtedly is that, when a successful work of imagination had been produced, it should not be recast. We cannot at this moment, call to mind a single instance in which this rule has been transgressed with happy effect, except the instance of the Rape of the Lock. Tasso recast his Jerusalem. Akenside recast his Pleasures of the Imagination, and his Epistle to Curio.
I pass over the comparison of Brutus with Jove, which by the way would have become Tully better than Akenside, but which Tully would have perhaps thought too bold. Cicero adorns his oration with this magnificent description. He relates it as an event, the other uses it as an illustration of that to which I humbly conceive it does not exactly apply.
Such a subject, too! intrinsically worthy of a niche in the temple of Fame, besides Hope, Memory, and Imagination, if only one could manage it well enough to be named in the same breath with Campbell, Rogers, and Akenside.
"We were talking of 'The Pleasures of Imagination," said Berenice to her father. "Mr. Harrington is a great admirer of Akenside." "Is he?" replied Mr. Montenero coldly, and with a look of absence. "But, my dear, we can have the pleasures of the imagination another time. Here are some realities worthy of our present attention." He then drew his daughter's arm within his.
Cardinal Wolsey, De Foe, Akenside, and Kirke White were the sons of butchers; Bunyan was a tinker, and Joseph Lancaster a basket-maker. Among the great names identified with the invention of the steam- engine are those of Newcomen, Watt, and Stephenson; the first a blacksmith, the second a maker of mathematical instruments, and the third an engine-fireman.
I had rather have written the most absurd lines in Lee, than "Leonidas" or "The Seasons;" as I had rather be put into the round-house for a wrong-headed quarrel, than sup quietly at eight o'clock with my grandmother. There is another of these tame genius's, a Mr. Akenside, who writes Odes: in one he has lately published, he says, "Light the tapers, urge the fire."
Akenside was a young man, warm with every notion that by nature or accident had been connected with the sound of liberty, and, by an eccentricity which such dispositions do not easily avoid, a lover of contradiction, and no friend to anything established. He adopted Shaftesbury's foolish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the discovery of truth.
The same circumstance occurred between AKENSIDE and DYSON. Dyson, when the poet was in great danger of adding one more illustrious name to the "Calamities of Authors," interposed between him and ill-fortune, by allowing him an annuity of three hundred a-year; and, when he found the fame of his literary friend attacked, although not in the habit of composition, he published a defence of his poetical and philosophical character.
That venality was denounced on the hustings, anathematized from the pulpit, and burlesqued on the stage; was attacked by Pope in brilliant verse, and by Bolingbroke in stately prose, by Swift with savage hatred, and by Gay with festive malice. The voices of Tories and Whigs, of Johnson and Akenside, of Smollett and Fielding, contributed to swell the cry.
See J.H. Burton's Hume, i. 174, for an account of him. See ante, i. 242. There is an account of him in Sir John Hawkins's Life of Johnson. In a coffee-house he attacked the profession of physic, which Akenside, who was a physician as well as poet, defended. 'Doctor, said Ballow, 'after all you have said, my opinion of the profession of physic is this.
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