In 1763, he read a paper before the Royal Society, on the "Effects
of a Blow on the Heart," which was published in the _Philosophical
Transactions_ of the year. And, in 1764 he established his character
as a medical writer by an elegant and elaborate treatise on
"The Dysentery," still, we believe, consulted for its information,
and studied for the purity and precision of its Latin style. About
this time, too, he commenced a recasting of his "Pleasures of
Imagination," which he did not live to finish; and in which, on the
whole, there is more of laborious alteration than of felicitous
improvement. In 1766, Warburton, his old foe, who had now been made a
bishop, reprinted, in a new edition of his "Divine Legation of Moses,"
his attack on Akenside's notions about ridicule, without deigning to
take any notice of the explanations he had given in his reply. This
renewal of hostilities, coming, especially as it did, from the
vantage ground of the Episcopal bench, enraged our poet, and, by way
of rejoinder, he issued a lyrical satire which he had had lying past
him in pickle for fifteen years, and which nothing but a fresh
provocation would have induced him to publish. It was entitled
"An Ode to the late Thomas Edwards, Esq." Edwards had opposed
Warburton ably in a book entitled "Canons of Criticism," and was
himself a poet. The real sting of this attack lay in Akenside's
production of a letter from Warburton to Concanen, dated 2d January
1726, which had fallen accidentally into the hands of our poet; and
in which Warburton had accused Addison of plagiarism, and said that
when "Pope borrows it is from want of genius." Concanen was one of
the "Dunces," and it was, of course, Akenside's purpose to shew
Warburton's inconsistency in the different opinions he had expressed
at different times of them and of their great adversary. We know not
if the sturdy bishop took any notice of this ode. Even his Briarean
arms were sometimes too full of the controversial work which his
overbearing temper and fierce passions were constantly giving him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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