In vain his weak but generous friend and patron introduced him at the clubs and balls, the assemblies and the Long-room; he failed to make himself popular with the men, and was ‘too indifferent to feminine nature to ingratiate himself with their wives and daughters.’ So that, with all his mental accomplishments, his handsome person, and the genius which Southey says distinguished his face, he made no friends, but, on the contrary, many enemies. When the secret of his family connections, and his dependence on Mr. Dyson, who generously allowed him £300 a year, oozed out, society at Hampstead, composed for the most part of opulent City men—which means successful men, too prone to despise the want of success in others—made no secret of its contempt for Akenside’s pretensions to superiority, and the end was that in less than three years all hopes of his succeeding as a physician at Hampstead had to be given up. Mr. Dyson then took a small house for him in Bloomsbury Square, and continued his allowance till his death in 1770, in the forty-ninth year of his age. A pleasant reminiscence of North End is that for some years it continued to be the chosen home of William Collins, the artist, who, from his boyhood, as his talented son has told us in his delightful memoir of him, had loved Hampstead, and spent many a summer day there, ‘watching the bird-catchers with their decoys and nets, the hedger with his high tanned gloves and bill-hook, cows going afield, hay-makers, and rosy rustic children.’ As he grew up, his love of Hampstead grew with him, and we catch glimpses of the young art student, sketching in the delightful fields and bosky lanes, occasionally laying down his pencil to refresh himself, as it were, with the quaintly-written devotional hymns of George Herbert, which he carried with him. In 1822-23 he married Miss Giddies, and in the summer of the same year took a cottage at Hampstead, and ‘in tranquillity and the companionship of his young wife studied Nature unremittingly.’ Hampstead Heath, which lay close to his door, became the scene and source of his best pictures. ‘Here he found his footsore trampers; the patched or picturesquely ragged beggars; the brutish or audacious boys; the itinerant rat-catcher, with the _dirt-shine_ on his leather breeches, and his ferrets and cage of rats.’ Like Linnell, Leslie, and Constable in those days, and Gainsborough in previous ones, he was never tired of the sweet beauty of his surroundings, or of exhibiting them to his friends. He was for ever discovering fresh points of view and new effects, and Hampstead proved to him, as to all other lovers and students of Nature, inexhaustible. [Illustration: _Cottages, North End._]