This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.

During a visit to Morpeth in 1738 Akenside had the idea for his didactic poem The Pleasures of the Imagination which was well received and later desecribed as 'of great beauty in its richness of description and language' and was also subsequently translated into more than one foreign language. He repaid the money that had been advanced for his theological studies and became a deist. His 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.

Mark Akenside (9 November 1721 – 23 June 1770) was an English poet and physician.