Mark, was of respectable though humble parentage, his father being a butcher in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where the poet was born on the 9th November 1721. His parents intended him for the Dissenting Church, and from an educational fund connected with his denomination, he received aid to prosecute the necessary studies at the university of Edinburgh. Subsequent reflection directed his aims to the study of medicine, and he afterwards honourably repaid to his denomination the sum which he had not devoted to the purpose for which it was bestowed. In 1741 he went to Leyden, to complete his medical curriculum. There he acquired the friendship of his afterwards munificent patron, Jeremiah Dyson, Esq. He received his degree of Doctor of Physic, and returning to England in 1744, published his Pleasures of Imagination, which was received with unbounded applause. He settled as a physician at Northampton, but found the field already pre-occupied. "Akenside tried the contest a while," says Johnson, "but, having deafened the place with clamours of liberty, he removed to Hampstead, and subsequently fixed himself in London, the proper place for a man of accomplishments like his." As medicine did not seem likely to earn for him the maintenance of a gentleman, his generous friend Mr Dyson, with whom he resided, settled on him an annuity of L300 a-year. He used every means, however, of advancing his reputation in his profession, by the publication of medical treatises, by obtaining a degree from Cambridge, by becoming a member of the Royal Society, and of the College of Physicians; and by the acceptance of public lectureships. "He advanced gradually in medical reputation, but never attained to any great extent of practice, or eminence of popularity." Sir John Hawkins alleges that he defeated his own efforts by "the high opinion he everywhere manifested of himself, and the little condescension he showed to men of inferior endowments." He was certainly a man of solid ability and extensive scholarship, but the warmth of his temperament intensified his vanity and arrogance to a ludicrous extent, and often placed him in mortifying circumstances. The humbleness of his birth was a thorn in his flesh, which his opponents loved to irritate. His manners were formal and strainedly dignified. He was a brilliant and pleasing companion, but exacting and pedantic in conversation. In Smollett's Peregrine Pickle Akenside is the ode-writing doctor who gives the feast after the manner of the ancients. His features were manly and expressive; his temper, though irritable, was kind and benevolent. He continued to write and wrangle amidst the literary society of London till the year 1770, when he died of a putrid fever, while he was engaged in re-casting Akenside's great poem; bequeathing to his patron Dyson the office of his literary executor. He is buried in the parish church of St James's, Westminster.

The Pleasures of Imagination is certainly a remarkable effort of a young man between twenty and twenty-three years of age; though it cannot compare in profundness of reflection with Pope's Essay on Man, nor in simple warmth of natural feeling with Campbell's Pleasures of Hope, both composed at the same period of life. Its design, as he himself explains, is "to give a view of these (pleasures), in the largest acceptation of the term; so that whatever our imagination feels from the agreeable appearances of nature, and all the various entertainments we meet with, either in poetry, painting, music, or any of the elegant arts, might be deducible from one or other of those principles in the constitution of the human mind, which are here established and explained." The poem has the fault of youth, in diffuseness and obscurity of expression in a train of subtle thinking; but its effect is brilliant and spirit-stirring; it is full of aspirations after the lofty, the liberal, and the good, and is coloured with the Attic graces resulting from a warm sympathy with the Grecian spirit. Of its philosophy the poet Gray speaks contemptuously as "infected with the Hutcheson jargon." Dr Thomas Brown has largely used its pictorial portions as illustrations in his ethical lectures. Of its poetry Johnson remarks that "his images are forms fantastically lost under a superfluity of dress."

"Pars minima est ipsa puella sui."

The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts the mind and settles in the ear. The reader wanders through the gay diffusion, sometimes amazed, sometimes delighted, but after many turnings in the flowery labyrinth, comes out as he went in. He observed little, and laid hold of nothing." The following is Professor Spalding's estimate: "A vivid fancy, a warm susceptibility of fine emotion, and an alluring pomp of language, are lavished on a series of pictures, illustrating the feelings of beauty and sublimity. The mischief is, that the poet, theorizing and poetizing by turns, loses his hold of his readers more than other writers whose topics are less abstract. The philosophical thinker finds better teaching elsewhere; and the poetical student, unless he is also metaphysically inclined, has his enthusiasm chilled by the intrusive dissertations."—History of English Literature.

Akenside's profusion of odes, hymns, epistles, and inscriptions, follow the artificial fashion of the eighteenth century. Most of these possess no great merit, but Johnson's condemnation of them appears too severe. This may possibly be in part owing to the spirit of freedom many of them breathe. For in his "hot youth," Akenside was a theoretical republican, and he continued throughout life a Whig, so far as the term implies what we understand by liberal principles. "Whether, when he resolved not to be a Dissenting minister," says Johnson, in speaking of Akenside's politics, "he ceased to be a Dissenter, I know not. He certainly retained an unnecessary and outrageous zeal for what he called and thought liberty; a zeal which sometimes disguises from the world, and not rarely from the mind which it possesses, an envious desire of plundering wealth, or of degrading greatness." The Epistle to Curio, which he afterwards spoiled by converting it into the Ode to Curio, is a bitter satire on Pulteney's desertion of his principles after the fall of Walpole. The Hymn to the Naiads, and the Hymn to Science, are perhaps the finest of Akenside's minor works.

The Pleasures of Imagination, his capital work, was first published in 1744. Extraordinary though it was, as the production of a man who had not reached his 23d year, he was afterwards sensible that it wanted revision and correction;