“ The ideas were largely borrowed from Addison’s essays on the imagination and from Lord Shaftesbury. Professor Dowden complains that “his tone is too high-pitched; his ideas are too much in the air; they do not nourish themselves in the common heart, the common life of man.” ”

“ He was elected a member of the Medical Society of Edinburgh in 1740. His ambitions already lay outside his profession, and his gifts as a speaker made him hope one day to enter parliament. In 1740 he printed his “Ode on the Winter Solstice” in a small volume of poems. In 1741 he left Edinburgh for Newcastle and began to call himself surgeon, though it is doubtful whether he practised, and from the next year dates his life-long friendship with Jeremiah Dyson (1722–1776) . During a visit to Morpeth in 1738 he had conceived the idea of his didactic poem, “The Pleasures of the Imagination.” ”

“ He left all his effects and his literary remains to Dyson, who issued an edition of his poems in 1772. This included the revised version of the Pleasures of Imagination, on which the author was engaged at his death. The first book of this work defines the powers of imagination and discusses the various kinds of pleasure to be derived from the perception of beauty; the second distinguishes works of imagination from philosophy ”