account for them. It is the preface to your late Remarks, that you are now called upon to justify; in which you have thought fit to treat upon a mighty free footing (as you style it, but in the apprehension of most people, upon a very injurious one), the ingenious and worthy author of the poem, entitled 'The Pleasures of Imagination. The favourable reception and applause, that performance has met with, render it unnecessary, and indeed impertinent, for me to enlarge in its praise ; especially as you, sir, have not condescended to enter into a particular censure of the poem. However, by some general hints, scattered up and down, as well as by the affectation of perpetually styling the author our poet, you have let us see how you stand affected towards it. Whether it be, indeed, that dull, trivial, useless thing, you seem to represent it, I shall not dispute with you; but am content to have, as to this point, Mr. Warburton's judgment staked against the general reputation of the poem. The point I am immediately concerned with, is, your unbecoming treatment of the author; which, as it is so interwoven through the whole course of your preface, as to be sufficiently evident without the allegation of repeated passages; so we shall find there are not wanting repeated instances of direct and notorious ill usage ;—such usage as, though the provocation had been ever so just, and the imagined attack upon you ever so real, would have yet been unwarrantable ; and which, therefore, cannot admit of the least shadow of an excuse, when it shall had really no provocation at all."

appear, that you

To this letter Warburton never replied.

The indignation of Akenside, and the zeal of Mr. Dyson, were a little too unmeasured; for the critic did not attack Akenside as a man, nor as a poet; he merely designated him a follower of Lord Shaftesbury; and an apologist for an opinion, that has now long been given up as untenable. Indeed the argument is, in itself, a species of the ridiculous. For who employs ridicule so often as half-informed, half-witted, insolent, and conceited persons? If ridicule, therefore, is a test of truth, these half-informed, half-witted, insolent, and conceited persons are the best judges of the most serious and sacred things *

"Ridicule may befriend either truth or falsehood; and as it is morally or immorally applied, may illustrate the one, or disguise the other. Yet it should seem, that the moral is more natural, than the immoral application of ridicule; inasmuch as truth is more congenial to the mind than falsehood, and so, the real more easily made apparent, than the fictitious images of things.

"Ridicule, therefore, being of a vague, unsteady nature, merely relative to the imaginations and passions of mankind, there must be several orders or degrees of it, suited to the fancies and capacities of those, whom the artist attempts to influence.

"But however ridicule may impress the idea of apparent turpitude or falsehood on the imagination; yet still reason

The subject of ridicule, indeed, is, in this poem, an intrusion; and that the author himself thought it so, may be inferred from his having, in the second poem, curtailed the subject so much, that what, in his first, occupies two hundred and seven lines, is reduced in the second to only fifty. The statement as to the final cause, however, is the same in both.

Akenside, I believe, was occasionally given to ridicule; and in return was himself ridiculed by a class of persons, with whom it was no great honour to be associated. Smollett did all he could against

remains the superior and corrective power. Therefore, every representation of ridicule, which only applies to the fancy and affections, must finally be examined and decided upon, must be tried, rejected, or received, as the reasoning faculty shall determine; and thus ridicule can never be a detector of falsehood, or a test of truth."-Brown's Essays on the Characteristics of the Earl of Shaftesbury.

See Characteristics, i. p. 30, 31, 61; also 11, 12, 128, 129. For Warburton's opinion, see Divine Legation of Moses, vol. i. x. xviii. xxxvii. xxxix.

Horace sums up the power of ridicule in one of those concise periods, of which he was so great a master.

Ridiculum acri

Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res.

The power of ridicule is admitted; but that power is very different from the test.

him in this way, in his novel of Peregrine Pickle; to which he is said to have been prompted by a pique*, he had taken, in consequence of Akenside's having made some reflections against Scotland.

We may here, perhaps, be excused for introducing a curious anecdote, in respect to Smollett. As he was one day going out of Paternoster-row up Warwick-lane leading to Warwick-square, a butcher came out of his slaughter-house with a dead sheep upon his back: "Get out of the way," said the butcher, "or I'll slam this ship in your face." At this moment Smollett's foot slipped, and catching hold of the butcher's arm to save his fall, both fell in the gutter, which was streaming with blood from the slaughter-houses. The butcher recovered himself first, and in rising gave Smollett a violent blow in the face with his bloody fist. Poor Smollett scrambled up as well as he could, all covered with gore; got into a shop, and there remained till a coach was procured to carry him home. He then resided in a court leading out of Dean-street, Soho. When he arrived, the children of the neighbourhood, seeing a man streaked with blood get out

See D'Israeli's Calamities of Authors, vol. ii. 2. "Akenside's mind and manners," says the author, 66 were of a fine, romantic cast."

of the coach, surrounded the house, and the whole place was kept for some time in a state of suspense and confusion. A constable was sent for to search the house, where the bloody man had been taken; and it was a long time before the crowd could be pacified and dispersed. Smollett lodged there only a few weeks after; during which time he was frequently hailed by the children, "There goes the bloody man."

Hearing that an opening for a physician presented itself at Northampton, Akenside went thither with an intention of establishing himself. But Dr. Stonehouse being in full practice, as he found soon after his arrival, and not relishing, as the vulgar saying is, the art of waiting for dead men's shoes, he returned to London after a stay of about a year and a half; and the only interesting circumstance, connected with his residence there, is an account, furnished us by Dr. Kippis; who says, that when he resided at Northampton, he well remembered hearing Dr. Doddridge and Dr. Akenside carry on an amicable debate "concerning the opinions of the ancient philosophers, with regard to a future state of rewards and punishments; in which Akenside supported the firm belief of Cicero in particular, in this great article of natural religion."