Akenside's self-love received a more humorous stab than the poke administered by Richard Chester's blunt cudgel, from Mr. Baker, one of the surgeons at St. Thomas's. To appreciate the full force of the story, the reader must recollect that the jealousy, which still exists between the two branches of the medical profession, was a century since so violent that even considerations of interest failed in some cases to induce eminent surgeons and physicians to act together. One of Baker's sons was the victim of epilepsy, and frequent fits had impaired his faculties. Baker was naturally acutely sensitive of his child's misfortune, and when Akenside had the bad taste to ask to what study the afflicted lad intended to apply, the father answered, "I find he is not capable of making a surgeon, so I have sent him to Edinburgh to make a physician of him." Akenside felt this sarcasm so much, that he for a long time afterward refused to hold any intercourse with Baker. But Akenside had many excuses for his irritability. He was very ambitious, and failed to achieve that success which the possession of great powers warranted him in regarding as his due. It was said of Garth that no physician understood his art more, or his trade less! and this, as Mr. Bucke, in his beautiful "Life of Arkenside," remarks, was equally true of the doctor of St. Thomas's. He had a thirst for human praise and worldly success, and a temperament that caused him, notwithstanding all his sarcasms against love, to estimate at their full worth the joys of married life; yet he lived all his days a poor man, and died a bachelor. Other griefs also contributed to sour his temper. His lot was cast in times that could not justly appreciate his literary excellences. His sincere admiration of classic literature and art and manners was regarded by the coarse herd of rich and stupid Londoners as so perfectly ridiculous, that when Smollett had the bad taste to introduce him into _Peregrine Pickle_, as the physician who gives a dinner after the manner of the ancients, the applause was general, and every city tradesman, with scholarship enough to read the novel, had a laugh at the expense of a man who has some claims to be regarded as the greatest literary genius of his time. The polished and refined circles of English life paid homage to his genius, but even in them he failed to meet with the cordial recognition he deserved. Johnson, though he placed him above Gray and Mason, did not do him justice. Boswell didn't see much in him. Horace Walpole differed from the friend who asked him to admire the "Pleasures of Imagination." The poets and wits of his own time had a high respect for his critical opinion, and admitted the excellence of his poetry--but almost invariably with some qualification. And Akenside was one who thirsted for the complete assent of the applauding world. He died after a brief illness in his forty-ninth year, on the 23rd of June, 1770; and we