It is said that Akenside was ashamed of his origin--and if so, he deserved the perpetual recollection of it, produced by a life-long lameness, originating in a cut from his father's cleaver. It is fitting that men, and especially great men, should suffer through their smallnesses of character. The boy was first sent to the Free School of Newcastle, and thence to a private academy kept by Mr. Wilson, a Dissenting minister of the place. He began rather early to display a taste for poetry and verse-writing; and, in April 1737, we find in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ a set of stanzas, entitled, "The Virtuoso, in imitation of Spenser's style and stanza," prefaced by a letter signed Marcus, in which the author, while requesting the insertion of his piece, pleads the apology of his extreme youth. One may see something of the future political zeal of the man in the boy's selection of one of the names of Brutus. The _Gentleman's Magazine_ was then rising toward that character of a readable medley and agreeable _olla podrida_, which it long bore, although its principal contributor--Johnson--did not join its staff till the next year. Its old numbers will even still repay perusal--at least we seldom enjoyed a greater treat than when in our boyhood we lighted on and read some twenty of its brown-hued, stout-backed, strong-bound volumes, filled with the debates in the Senate of Lilliput--with Johnson's early Lives and Essays--with mediocre poetry--interesting scraps of meteorological and scientific information--ghost stories and fairy tales--alternating with timid politics, and with sarcasms at the great, veiled under initials, asterisks, and innuendoes; and even now many, we believe, feel it quite a luxury to recur from the personalities and floridities of modern periodicals to its quiet, cool, sober, and sensible pages. To it Akenside contributed afterwards a fable, called "Ambition and Content," a "Hymn to Science," and a few more poetical pieces (written not, as commonly said, in Edinburgh, but in Newcastle, in 1739). It has been asserted that he composed his "Pleasures of Imagination" while visiting some relations at Morpeth, when only seventeen years of age; but although he himself assures us that he spent many happy and inspired hours in that region, "Led In silence by some powerful hand unseen,"