to Caesar to pay his debts.  In Akenside’s poem, Curio represents William Pulteney, Walpole’s antagonist, the hope of that younger generation who hated Walpole’s system of parliamentary corruption and official jobbing.  This party had looked to Pulteney for a clean and public-spirited administration.  Their hero was carried to a brief triumph on the wave of their enthusiasm.  But Pulteney disappointed them bitterly:  he took a peerage, and sunk into utter and permanent political damnation, with no choice but Walpole’s methods and tools, no policy save Walpole’s to redeem the withdrawal of so much lofty promise, and no aims but personal advancement.  From Akenside’s address to him, the famous ‘Epistle to Curio,’ a citation is made below.  Akenside’s fame, however, rests on the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination.’  He began it at seventeen; though in the case of works begun in childhood, it is safer to accept the date of finishing as the year of the real composition.  He published it six years later, in 1744, on the advice and with the warm admiration of Pope, a man never wasteful of encomiums on the poetry of his contemporaries.  It raised its author to immediate fame.  It secures him a place among the accepted English classics still.  Yet neither its thought nor its style makes the omission to read it any irreparable loss.  It is cultivated rhetoric rather than true poetry.  Its chief merit and highest usefulness are that it suggested two far superior poems, Campbell’s ‘Pleasures of Hope’ and Rogers’s ’Pleasures of Memory.’  It is the relationship to these that really keeps Akenside’s alive.

In scope, the poem consists of two thousand lines of blank verse.  It is distributed in three books.  The first defines the sources, methods, and results of imagination; the second its distinction from philosophy and its enchantment by the passions; the third sets forth the power of imagination to give pleasure, and illustrates its mental operation.  The author remodeled the poem in 1757, but it is generally agreed that he injured it.  Macaulay says he spoiled it, and another critic delightfully observes that he “stuffed it with intellectual horsehair.”

The year of Akenside’s death (1770) gave birth to Wordsworth.  The freer and nobler natural school of poetry came to supplant the artificial one, belonging to an epoch of wigs and false calves, and to open toward the far greater one of the romanticism of Scott and Byron.

FROM THE EPISTLE TO CURIO

[With this earlier and finer form of Akenside’s address to the unstable Pulteney (see biographical sketch above) must not be confused its later embodiment among his odes; of which it is ‘IX:  to Curio.’  Much of its thought and diction were transferred to the Ode named; but the latter by no means happily compares with the original ‘Epistle.’  Both versions, however, are of the same year, 1744.]