In one point Akenside differed from the majority of his tuneful
brethren, before, then, or since. He was a warm and wide-hearted
commender of the works of other poets. Most of our sweet singers
rather resemble birds of prey than nightingales or doves, and are at
least as strong in their talons as they are musical in their tongues.
And hence the groves of Parnassus have in all ages rung with the
screams of wrath and contest, frightfully mingling with the melodies
of song. Akenside, by a felicitous conjunction of elements, which
you could not have expected from other parts of his character, was
entirely exempted from this defect, and not only warmly admired Pope,
Young, Thomson, and Dyer, whose "Fleece" he corrected, but had kind
words to spare for even such "small deer" as Welsted and Fenton.

In 1763, he read a paper before the Royal Society, on the "Effects
of a Blow on the Heart," which was published in the _Philosophical
Transactions_ of the year. And, in 1764 he established his character
as a medical writer by an elegant and elaborate treatise on
"The Dysentery," still, we believe, consulted for its information,
and studied for the purity and precision of its Latin style. About
this time, too, he commenced a recasting of his "Pleasures of
Imagination," which he did not live to finish; and in which, on the
whole, there is more of laborious alteration than of felicitous
improvement. In 1766, Warburton, his old foe, who had now been made a
bishop, reprinted, in a new edition of his "Divine Legation of Moses,"
his attack on Akenside's notions about ridicule, without deigning to
take any notice of the explanations he had given in his reply. This
renewal of hostilities, coming, especially as it did, from the
vantage ground of the Episcopal bench, enraged our poet, and, by way
of rejoinder, he issued a lyrical satire which he had had lying past
him in pickle for fifteen years, and which nothing but a fresh