ly find to be
like the blank verses of his neighbors." Shenstone encouraged Percy to
publish his "Reliques." The plans for the grounds at Abbotsford were
somewhat influenced by Didsley's description of the Leasowes, which Scott
studied with great interest.

In 1744 Mark Akenside, a north country man and educated partly in
Scotland, published his "Pleasures of Imagination," afterwards rewritten
as "The Pleasures of the Imagination" and spoiled in the process. The
title and something of the course of thought in the poem were taken from
Addison's series of papers on the subject (_Spectator_, Nos. 411-421).
Akenside was a man of learning and a physician of distinction. His poem,
printed when he was only twenty-three, enjoyed a popularity now rather
hard to account for. Gray complained of its obscurity and said it was
issued nine years too early, but admitted that now and then it rose "even
to the best, particularly in description." Akenside was harsh, formal,
and dogmatic, as a man. Smollett caricatured him in "Peregrine Pickle."
Johnson hated his Whig principles and represents him, when settled at
Northampton, as "having deafened the place with clamors for liberty."[47]
He furthermore disliked the class of poetry to which Akenside's work
belonged, and he told Boswell that he couldn't read it. Still he speaks
of him with a certain cautious respect, which seems rather a concession
to contemporary opinion than an appreciation of the critic's own. He
even acknowledges that Akenside has "few artifices of disgust than most
of his brethren of the blank song." Lowell says that the very title of
Akenside's poem pointed "away from the level highway of commonplace to
mountain paths and less dogmatic prospects. The poem was stiff and
unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births. Without it,
the 'Lines Written at Tintern Abbey' might never have been."

One cannot read "The Pleasures of Imagination" without becoming sensible
that the writer was possessed of poetic feeling, and feeling of a kind
that we generally agree to call romantic. His doctrine at least, if not
his practice, was in harmony with the fresh impulse which was coming into
English poetry. Thus he celebrates heaven-born genius and the
inspiration of nature, and decries "the critic-verse" and the effort to
scale Parnassus "by dull obedience." He invokes the peculiar muse of the
new school:

"Indulgent _Fancy_, from the fruitful banks
O