pounds a year. Thus supported, he advanced gradually in medical
reputation, but never attained any great extent of practice or
eminence of popularity. A physician in a great city seems to be the
mere plaything of fortune; his degree of reputation is, for the most
part, totally casual--they that employ him know not his excellence;
they that reject him know not his deficience. By any acute observer
who had looked on the transactions of the medical world for half a
century a very curious book might be written on the "Fortune of
Physicians."

Akenside appears not to have been wanting to his own success: he
placed himself in view by all the common methods; he became a Fellow
of the Royal Society; he obtained a degree at Cambridge; and was
admitted into the College of Physicians; he wrote little poetry, but
published from time to time medical essays and observations; he
became physician to St. Thomas's Hospital; he read the Gulstonian
Lectures in Anatomy; but began to give, for the Croonian Lecture, a
history of the revival of learning, from which he soon desisted; and
in conversation he very eagerly forced himself into notice by an
ambitious ostentation of elegance and literature. His "Discourse on
the Dysentery" (1764) was considered as a very conspicuous specimen
of Latinity, which entitled him to the same height of place among
the scholars as he possessed before among the wits; and he might
perhaps have risen to a greater elevation of character but that his
studies were ended with his life by a putrid fever June 23, 1770, in
the forty-ninth year of his age.

Akenside is to be considered as a didactic and lyric poet. His
great work is the "Pleasures of Imagination," a performance which,
published as it was at the age of twenty-three, raised expectations