[Illustration:  Mark Akenside]

He was the son of a butcher, born November 9th, 1721, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, whence Eldon and Stowell also sprang.  He attracted great attention by an early poem, ‘The Virtuoso.’  The citizens of that commercial town have always appreciated their great men and valued intellectual distinction, and its Dissenters sent him at their own expense to Edinburgh to study for the Presbyterian ministry.  A year later he gave up theology for medicine—­honorably repaying the money advanced for his divinity studies, if obviously out of some one’s else pocket.

After some struggle in provincial towns, his immense literary reputation—­for at twenty-four he was a star of the first magnitude in Great Britain—­and the generosity of a friend enabled him to acquire a fashionable London practice.  He wrote medical treatises which at the time made him a leader in his profession, secured a rich clientage, and prospered greatly.  In 1759 he was made physician to Christ’s Hospital, where, however valued professionally, he is charged with being brutal and offensive to the poor; with indulging his fastidiousness, temper, and pomposity, and with forgetting that he owed anything to mere duty or humanity.

Unfortunately, too, Akenside availed himself of that mixture of complaisance and arrogance by which almost alone a man of no birth can rise in a society graded by birth.  He concealed his origin and was ashamed of his pedigree.  But the blame for his flunkeyism belongs, perhaps, less to him than to the insolent caste feeling of society, which forced it on him as a measure of self-defense and of advancement.  He wanted money, loved place and selfish comfort, and his nature did not balk at the means of getting them,—­including living on a friend when he did not need such help.  To become physician to the Queen, he turned his coat from Whig to Tory; but no one familiar with the politics of the time will regard this as an unusual offense.  It must also be remembered that Akenside possessed a delicate constitution, keen senses, and irritable nerves; and that he was a parvenu, lacking the power of self-control even among strangers.  These traits explain, though they do not excuse, his bad temper to the unclean and disagreeable patients of the hospital, and they mitigate the fact that his industry was paralyzed by material prosperity, and his self-culture interfered with by conceit.  His early and sweeping success injured him as many a greater man has been thus injured.

Moreover, his temper was probably soured by secret bitternesses.  His health, his nerves, an entire absence of the sense of humor, and his lack of repartee, made him shun like Pope and Horace Walpole the bibulous and gluttonous element of eighteenth-century British society.  For its brutal horseplay and uncivil practical joking which passed for wit, Akenside had no tolerance, yet he felt unwilling to go where he would be outshone by inferior men.  His strutty