arrogance of manner, like excessive prudery in a woman, may have been a fortification to a garrison too weak to fight in the open field.  And it must be admitted that, as so often happens, Akenside’s outward ensemble was eminently what the vulgar world terms “guyable.”  He was not a little of a fop.  He was plain-featured and yet assuming in manner.  He hobbled in walking from lameness of tell-tale origin,—­a cleaver falling on his foot in childhood, compelling him to wear an artificial heel—­and he was morbidly sensitive over it.  His prim formality of manner, his sword and stiff-curled wig, his small and sickly face trying to maintain an expression impressively dignified, made him a ludicrous figure, which his contemporaries never tired of ridiculing and caricaturing.  Henderson, the actor, said that “Akenside, when he walked the streets, looked for all the world like one of his own Alexandrines set upright.”  Smollett even used him as a model for the pedantic doctor in ’Peregrine Pickle,’ who gives a dinner in the fashion of the ancients, and dresses each dish according to humorous literary recipes.

But there were those who seem to have known an inner and superior personality beneath the brusqueness, conceit, and policy, beyond the nerves and fears; and they valued it greatly, at least on the intellectual side.  A wealthy and amiable young Londoner, Jeremiah Dyson, remained a friend so enduring and admiring as to give the poet a house in Bloomsbury Square, with L300 a year and a chariot, and personally to extend his medical practice.  We cannot suppose this to be a case of patron and parasite.  Other men of judgment showed like esteem.  And in congenial society, Akenside was his best and therefore truest self.  He was an easy and even brilliant talker, displaying learning and immense memory, taste, and philosophic reflection; and as a volunteer critic he has the unique distinction of a man who had what books he liked given him by the publishers for the sake of his oral comments!

The standard edition of Akenside’s poems is that edited by Alexander Dyce (London, 1835).  Few of them require notice here.  His early effort, ‘The Virtuoso,’ was merely an acknowledged and servile imitation of Spenser.  The claim made by the poet’s biographers that he preceded Thomson in reintroducing the Spenserian stanza is groundless.  Pope preceded him, and Thomson renewed its popularity by being the first to use it in a poem of real merit, ‘The Castle of Indolence.’  Mr. Gosse calls the ‘Hymn to the Naiads’ “beautiful,”—­“of transcendent merit,”—­“perhaps the most elegant of his productions.”  The ’Epistle to Curio,’ however, must be held his best poem,—­doubtless because it is the only one which came from his heart; and even its merit is much more in rhetorical energy than in art or beauty.  As to its allusion and object, the real and classic Curio of Roman social history was a protege of Cicero’s, a rich young Senator, who began as a champion of liberty and then sold himself