In 1766, Akenside received the thanks of the College of Physicians for an edition of Harvey's works, which he prepared for the press, and to which he had prefixed a preface. In June 1767 he read before the College two papers, one on "Cancers and Asthmas," and the other on "White Swelling of the Joints," both of which were published the next year in the first volume of the _Medical Transactions_. In the same year, one Archibald Campbell, a Scotchman, a purser in the navy, and called, from his ungainly countenance, "horrible Campbell," produced a small _jeu d'esprit_, entitled "Lexiphanes, imitated from Lucian, and suited to the present times," in which he tries to ridicule Johnson's prose and Akenside's poetry. His object was probably to attract their notice, but both passed over this grin of the "Grim Feature" in silent contempt. Akenside was still busy with the revisal of his poem, had finished two books, "made considerable progress with the third, and written a fragment of the fourth;" but death stepped in and blighted his prospects, both as a physician, with increasing practice and reputation, and as a poet, whose favourite work was approaching what he deemed perfection. He was seized with putrid fever; and, after a short illness, died on the 23 d June 1770 at an age when many men are in their very prime, both of body and mind--that of 49. He died in his house in Burlington Street, and was buried on the 28th in St. James's Church. Akenside had been, notwithstanding his many acquaintances and friends, on the whole, a lonely man; without domestic connexions, and having, so far as we are informed, either no surviving relations or no intercourse with those who might be still alive. He was not especially loved in society; he wanted humour and good-humour both, and had little of that frank cordiality which, according to Sidney Smith, "warms and cheers more than meat or wine." He had far less geniality than genius. Yet, in certain select circles, his mind, which was richly stored with all knowledge, opened delightfully, and men felt that he _was_ the author of his splendid poem. One of his biographers gives him the palm for learning, next to Ben Jonson, Milton, and Gray (he might perhaps have also excepted Landor and Coleridge), over all our English poets. In 1772, Mr. Dyson published an edition of his friend's poems, containing the original form of the "Pleasures of Imagination," as well as its half-finished second shape; his "Odes," "Inscriptions," "Hymn to the Naiads," etc., omitting, however, his poem to Curio in its first and best version, and some of his smaller pieces. This edition, too, contained an account of Akenside's life by his friend, so short and so cold as either to say little for Dyson's heart, or a great deal for his modesty and reticence. His uniform and munificent kindness to the poet during his lifetime, however, determines us in favour of the latter side of the alternative.