however, a similarity, though it may not be an imitation; and is given as an example of that art in composition which can ornament the humblest conception, like the graceful vest thrown over naked and sordid beggary.

I consider the following lines as strictly copied by Thomas Warton:

The daring artist

Explored the pangs that rend the royal breast,
Those wounds that lurk beneath the tissued vest.

T. WARTON on Shakspeare.

Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Defence of Poesie," has the same image. He writes, "Tragedy openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue."

The same appropriation of thought will attach to the following lines of Tickell:

While the charm'd reader with thy thought complies,
And views thy Rosamond with Henry's eyes.

Evidently from the French Horace :

TICKELL to ADDISON.

En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue;
Tout Paris, pour Chimene, a les yeux de Rodrigue.

BOILEAU.

Oldham, the satirist, says in his satires upon the Jesuits, that had Cain been of this black fraternity, he had not been content with a quarter of mankind.

Had he been Jesuit, had he but put on
Their savage cruelty, the rest had gone!

Satire ii.

Doubtless at that moment echoed in his poetical ear the energetic and caustic epigram of Andrew Marvel, against Blood stealing the crown dressed in a parson's cassock, and sparing the life of the keeper:

With the Priest's vestment had he but put on
The Prelate's cruelty-the Crown had gone!

The following passages seem echoes to each other, and it is but justice due to Oldham, the satirist, to acknowledge him as the parent of this antithesis:

On Butler who can think without just rage,

The glory and the scandal of the age?

Satire against Poetry.

It seems evidently borrowed by Pope, when he applies the thought to Erasmus :

At length Erasmus, that great injured name,
The glory of the priesthood and the shame!

Young remembered the antithesis when he said,

Of some for glory such the boundless rage,
That they're the blackest scandal of the age.

Voltaire, a great reader of Pope, seems to have borrowed part of the expression :

Scandale d'Eglise, et des rois le modèle.

De Caux, an old French poet, in one of his moral poems on an hour-glass, inserted in modern collections, has many ingenious thoughts. That this poem was read and admired by Goldsmith, the following beautiful image seems to indicate. De Caux, comparing the world to his hour-glass, says beautifully,

C'est un verre qui luit,

Qu'un souffle peut détruire, et qu'un souffle a produit. Goldsmith applies the thought very happily:

Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;

A breath can make them, as a breath has made.

I do not know whether we might not read, for modern copies are sometimes incorrect,

A breath unmakes them, as a breath has made.

Thomson, in his pastoral story of Palemon and Lavinia, appears to have copied a passage from Otway. Palemon thus addresses Lavinia :

Oh, let me now into a richer soil

Transplant thee safe, where vernal suns and showers
Diffuse their warmest, largest influence;

And of my garden be the pride and joy!

Chamont employs the same image when speaking of Monimia; he says—

You took her up a little tender flower,

and with a careful loving hand

Transplanted her into your own fair garden,

Where the sun always shines.

The origin of the following imagery is undoubtedly

Grecian; but it is still embellished and modified by our

best poets:

While universal Pan,

Gray, in repeating this imagery, has borrowed a remarkable epithet from Milton:

Collins, in his Ode to Fear, whom he associates with Danger, there grandly personified, was I think considerably indebted to the following stanza of Spenser :

Next him was Fear, all arm'd from top to toe,
Yet thought himself not safe enough thereby :
But fear'd each sudden movement to and fro;
And his own arms when glittering he did spy,
Or clashing heard, he fast away did fly,
As ashes pale of hue and wingy heel'd;
And evermore on Danger fix'd his eye,

'Gainst whom he always bent a brazen shield,
Which his right hand unarmed fearfully did wield.
Faery Queen, B. iii. c. 12, s. 12.

Warm from its perusal, he seems to have seized it as a hint to the Ode to Fear, and in his "Passions" to have very finely copied an idea here:

First Fear, his hand, his skill to try,

Amid the chords bewildered laid,
And back recoil'd, he knew not why,
E'en at the sound himself had made.

Ode to the Passions.

The stanza in Beattie's "Minstrel," first book, in which

his "visionary boy," after "the storm of summer rain," views "the rainbow brighten to the setting sun," and runs to reach it:

Fond fool, that deem'st the streaming glory nigh,
How vain the chase thine ardour has begun!
'Tis fled afar, ere half thy purposed race be run;
Thus it fares with age, &c.

The same train of thought and imagery applied to the same subject, though the image itself be somewhat different, may be found in the poems of the platonic John Norris; a writer who has great originality of thought, and a highly poetical spirit. His stanza runs thus:

So to the unthinking boy the distant sky
Seems on some mountain's surface to relie;
He with ambitious haste climbs the ascent,
Curious to touch the firmament ;
But when with an unwearied pace,
He is arrived at the long-wish'd for place,
With sighs the sad defeat he does deplore,
His heaven is still as distant as before!

The Infidel, by JOHN NORRIS.

In the modern tragedy of The Castle Spectre is this fine description of the ghost of Evelina :-"Suddenly a female form glided along the vault. I flew towards her. My arms were already unclosed to clasp her, when suddenly her figure changed! Her face grew pale-a stream of blood gushed from her bosom. While speaking, her form withered away; the flesh fell from her bones; a skeleton loathsome and meagre clasped me in her mouldering arms. Her infected breath was mingled with mine; her rotting fingers pressed my hand; and my face was covered with her kisses. Oh! then how I trembled with disgust!"

There is undoubtedly singular merit in this description. I shall contrast it with one which the French Virgil has written, in an age whose faith was stronger in ghosts than ours, yet which perhaps had less skill in describing them. There are some circumstances which seem to indicate that the author of the Castle Spectre lighted his torch at the altar of the French muse. Athalia thus narrates her dream, in which the spectre of Jezabel, her mother, appears :

C'étoit pendant l'horreur d'une profonde nuit,
Ma mère Jezabel devant moi s'est montrée,
Comme au jour de sa mort, pompeusement paree.-
-En achevant ces mots epouvantables,

Son ombre vers mon lit a paru se baisser,
Et moi, je lui tendois les mains pour l'embrasser,
Mais je n'ai plus trouvé qu'un horrible mélange
D'os et de chair meurtris, et trainée dans la fange,
Des lambeaux pleins de sang et des membres affreux.
RACINE'S Athalie, Acte ii. s. 5.

Goldsmith, when, in his pedestrian tour, he sat amid the Alps, as he paints himself in his "Traveller," and felt himself the solitary neglected genius he was, desolate amidst the surrounding scenery, probably at that moment applied to himself the following beautiful imagery of Thomson:

As in the hollow breast of Apennine
Beneath the centre of encircling hills,
A myrtle rises, far from human eyes,

And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild.

Autumn, v. 202.

Goldsmith very pathetically applies a similar image:

E'en now where Alpine solitudes ascend,

I sit me down a pensive hour to spend,
Like yon neglected shrub at random east,

That shades the steep, and sighs at every blast.

Traveller.

Akenside illustrates the native impulse of genius by a simile of Memnon's marble statue, sounding its lyre at the touch of the sun:

For as old Memnon's image, long renown'd
By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch
Of Titan's ray, with each repulsive string
Consenting, sounded through the warbling air
Unbidden strains; even so did nature's hand, &c.

It is remarkable that the same image, which does not appear obvious enough to have been the common inheritance of poets, is precisely used by old Regnier, the first French satirist, in the dedication of his Satires to the French king. Louis XIV. supplies the place of nature to the courtly satirist. These are his words:- -"On lit qu'en Ethiope il y avoit une statue qui rendoit un son harmonieux, toutes les fois que le soleil levant la regardoit. Ce même miracle, Sire, avez vous fait en moi, qui touché de l'astre de Votre Majesté, ai reçu la voix et la parole."

In that sublime passage in "Pope's Essay on Man," Epist. i. v. 237, beginning,

Vast chain of being! which from God began,

and proceeds to