th very
little care what shall be established.

Akenside was one of those poets who have felt very early the motions of
genius, and one of those students who have very early stored their
memories with sentiments and images. Many of his performances were
produced in his youth; and his greatest work, the Pleasures of
Imagination, appeared in 1744. I have heard Dodsley, by whom it was
published, relate, that when the copy was offered him, the price
demanded for it, which was a hundred and twenty pounds, being such as he
was not inclined to give precipitately, he carried the work to Pope,
who, having looked into it, advised him not to make a niggardly offer;
for "this was no every-day writer."

In 1741 he went to Leyden, in pursuit of medical knowledge; and three
years afterwards, May 16, 1744, became doctor of physick, having,
according to the custom of the Dutch universities, published a thesis or
dissertation. The subject which he chose was the Original and Growth of
the Human Foetus; in which he is said to have departed, with great
judgment, from the opinion then established, and to have delivered that
which has been since confirmed and received.

Akenside was a young man, warm with every notion that by nature or
accident had been connected with the sound of liberty, and, by an
eccentricity which such dispositions do not easily avoid, a lover of
contradiction, and no friend to any thing established. He adopted
Shaftesbury's foolish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the
discovery of truth. For this he was attacked by Warburton, and defended
by Dyson: Warburton afterwards reprinted his remarks at the end of his
dedication to the Freethinkers.

The result of all the arguments, which have been produced in a long and
eager discussion of this idle question, may easily be collected. If
ridicule be applied to any position, as the test of truth, it will then
become a question whether such ridicule be just; and this can only be
decided by the application of truth, as the test of ridicule. Two men,
fearing, one a real and the other a fancied danger, will be for awhile
equally exposed to the inevitable consequences of cowardice,
contemptuous censure, and ludicrous representation; and the true state
of both cases must be known, before it can be decided whose terrour is
rational, and whose is ridiculous; who is to be pitied, and who to be
despised. Both are for awhile equally exposed to laughter, but both are
not, theref