MARK AKENSIDE.—­Thomson had restored or reproduced the pastoral from Nature’s self; Akenside followed in his steps.  Thomson had invested blank verse with a new power and beauty; Akenside produced it quite as excellent.  But Thomson was the original, and Akenside the copy.  The one is natural, the other artificial.

Akenside was the son of a butcher, and was born at New Castle, in 1721.  Educated at the University of Edinburgh, he studied medicine, and received, at different periods, lucrative and honorable professional appointments.  His great work, and the only one to which we need refer, is his Pleasures of the Imagination.  Whether his view of the imagination is always correct or not, his sentiments are always elevated; his language high sounding but frequently redundant, and his versification correct and pleasing.  His descriptions of nature are cold but correct; his standard of humanity is high but mortal.  Grand and sonorous, he constructs his periods with the manner of a declaimer; his ascriptions and apostrophes are like those of a high-priest.  The title of his poem, if nothing more, suggested The Pleasures-of Hope to Campbell, and The Pleasures of Memory to Rogers.  As a man, Akenside was overbearing and dictatorial; as a hospital surgeon, harsh in his treatment of poor patients.  His hymn to the Naiads has been considered the most thoroughly and correctly classical of anything in English.  He died on the 23rd of June, 1770.

THOMAS GRAY.—­Among those who form a link between the school of Pope and that of the modern poets, Gray occupies a distinguished place, both from the excellence of his writings, and from the fact that, while he unconsciously conduced to the modern, he instinctively resisted its progress.  He was in taste and intention an extreme classicist.  Thomas Gray was born in London on the 26th December, 1716.  His father was a money scrivener, and, to his family at least, a bad man; his mother, forced to support herself, kept a linen-draper shop; and to her the poet owed his entire education.  He was entered at Eton College, and afterwards at Cambridge, and found in early life such friendships as were of great importance to him later in his career.  Among his college friends were Horace Walpole, West, the son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and William Mason, who afterwards wrote the poet’s life.  After completing his college course, he travelled on the continent with Walpole; but, on account of incompatibility of temper, they quarrelled and parted, and Gray returned home.  Although Walpole took the blame upon himself, it would appear that Gray was a somewhat captious person, whose serious tastes interfered with the gayer pleasures of his friend.  On his return, Gray went to Cambridge, where he led the life of a retired student, devoting himself to the ancient authors, to poetry, botany, architecture, and heraldry.  He was fastidious as to his own productions, which were very few, and which he kept by him, pruning, altering, and polishing, for a long time before he would let them see the light.  His lines entitled A Distant Prospect of Eton College appeared in 1742, and were received with great applause.