1. Mark Akenside was slightly lame all his life from a wound he received as a child from his father's cleaver.
15 Facts About Mark Akenside
1. 2.
Mark Akenside had already contributed The Virtuoso, in imitation of Spenser's style and stanza to the Gentleman's Magazine, and in 1738 A British Philippic, occasioned by the Insults of the Spaniards, and the present Preparations for War.
3.
Mark Akenside repaid the money that had been advanced for his theological studies, and became a deist.
4.
Mark Akenside's politics, said Dr Samuel Johnson, were characterized by an "impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established," and he is caricatured in the republican doctor of Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle.
5.
Mark Akenside was elected a member of the Medical Society of Edinburgh in 1740.
6.
Mark Akenside's powers fell short of this ambition; his imagination was not brilliant enough to surmount the difficulties inherent in a poem dealing so largely with abstractions; but the work was well received.
7.
Mark Akenside had come to London and was trying to make a practice at Hampstead.
8.
Mark Akenside was now twenty-five years old, and began to devote himself almost exclusively to his profession.
9.
Mark Akenside was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1753.
10.
At the accession of George III both Dyson and Mark Akenside changed their political opinions, and Mark Akenside's conversion to Tory principles was rewarded by the appointment of physician to the queen.
11.
Mark Akenside died at his house in Burlington Street, where he had lived from 1762.
12.
Mark Akenside left all his effects and his literary remains to Dyson, who issued an edition of his poems in 1772.
13.
Mark Akenside's verse was better when it was subjected to more severe metrical rules.
14.
Mark Akenside's odes are rarely lyrical in the strict sense, but they are dignified and often musical.
15.
See Dyce's Life of Mark Akenside prefixed to his edition, Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and the Life, Writings and Genius of Mark Akenside by Charles Bucke.