"Let us lament in sorrow sore,

For Kent Street well may say,

That, had she lived a twelvemonth more,
She had not died to-day."

In Goldsmith's "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog," written in a similar strain of conceit, there is a stanza taken from "Monsieur La Palisse:"

"Bien instruit dès le berceau,

Jamais, tant il fut honnête,
Il ne mettait son chapeau,
Qu'il ne se couvrit la tête."
"A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad,
When he put on his clothes."

Then we have

the epitaph on

on Edward

Purdon :

"Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed,

Who long was a bookseller's hack;

He led such a damnable life in this world,
I don't think he'll wish to come back."

Which Goldsmith has copied from this of the
Chevalier de Cailly:-

"Il est au bout de ses travaux,

Il a passé le Sieur Etienne;
En ce monde il eut tant de maux,

Qu'on ne croit pas qu'il revienne."

Pope too has imitated this in the Epitaph:"Well then, poor G lies underground,

So there's an end of honest Jack:

So little justice here he found,

'Tis ten to one he'll ne'er come back."

R

To these may be added the well-known lines in the "Hermit:"

"Man wants but little here below,

Nor wants that little long."

Which have their parallel in Young's fourth Night:

"Man wants but little, nor that little long."

It has been asserted that Goldsmith was indebted for his beautiful ballad of the "Hermit" to Percy's ballad of the "Friars of Orders Gray;" but the truth seems to be that Percy, not Goldsmith, was the borrower. Percy, while collecting his "Reliques," showed Goldsmith the manuscript of the old ballad of the "Gentle Herdsman," and from this Goldsmith took the hint of his "Hermit.". Having finished his poem, Goldsmith, in his turn, read it to Percy, who took from it the plan of his "Friars of Orders Gray," adopting not only the style and incidents, but in many places the very words of Goldsmith's delightful little poem-all, in fact, but its inimitable simplicity and pathos. (See Boswell's "Life of Johnson.")

Dr. Young has a passage in which he describes

man as

66

Midway from nothing to the Deity."

For this he is indebted to Pascal's remark:

Qu'est-ce que l'homme dans la nature ? un néant à l'égard de l'infini; un tout à l'égard du néant; un milieu entre rien et tout."

The following lines present another sample:

"Our birth is nothing but our death begun,

And cradles rock us nearer to the tomb;
Lamented, or lamenting, all one lot."

The original of which Young found in this passage in one of Bishop Hall's "Epistles:”—

"Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave. We lament the loss of our parents; how soon shall our sons bewail us ?"

J.-B. Rousseau has the principal thought in one of his "Odes:"

"Le premier moment de la vie

Est le premier pas vers la mort."

Then we have the lines:

-

"Woes cluster; rare are solitary woes;

They love a train; they tread each other's heels."

Of which Young found the original in "Hamlet:".

"One woe doth tread upon another's heel,

or, as Herrick has it in his "Hesperides:"

"Thus woe succeeds a woe, as wave a wave.”

Another appropriation in Young is the line:

"The course of Nature is the art of God;"

which is taken from Brown's "

dici :".

Religio Me

"In brief, all things are artificial; for Nature is the art of God."

Thomson, in his "Castle of Indolence," has the line:

"As thick as idle motes in sunny ray;"

which has its parallel in Milton's "Il Pen

seroso:

"As thick and numberless

As the gay motes that people the sunbeams."

And Milton has taken the simile from this of Chaucer :

"As thick as motes in the sunne beams."

There is a well-known epigram in Pope :

"You beat your pate and fancy wit will come :
Knock as you please, there's nobody at home."

Which Cowper has adopted, in nearly the same words, in his poem on "Conversation:"

"His wit invites you by his looks to come;
But when you knock, it never is at home."

The following sample is from the same poem :

"The solemn fop, significant and budge,

A fool with judges, among fools a judge."

The sentiment, however, has so many parallels among the ancients, that it is uncertain from which of them Cowper has adopted it. Plato has it in the sentence:

φιλοσόφοις, φιλόσοφος δὲ ἐν ἰδιώταις.”

ἐκαλεῖτο ἰδιώτης μὲν ἐν

It occurs in Seneca in the following form :

Sparsum memini hominem, inter scholasticos insanum, inter sanos scholasticum."

Apuleius has it in the words :

"Inter doctos nobilissimus, inter nobiles doctissimus, inter utrosque optimus."

And St. Jerome, in his remarks on the Prætorian Prefect Dardanus, whom he describes as,

"Christianorum nobilissime, nobilium christianissime."

To which may be added this of Sir Walter Scott:

"It was in this sphere that Napoleon was seen to greatest advantage; for, although too much of a soldier among sovereigns, no one could claim with better right to be a sovereign among soldiers."-Life of Napoleon.

A noted instance of this antithesis is Dr. Johnson's sarcastic application of it to Lord Chesterfield:

"This man, I thought, had been a lord among wits, but I find he is only a wit among lords."

The oft-quoted line in Cowper's "Task,"

England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,"

is taken from this passage in Churchill's "Farewell:"

"Be England what she will,

With all her faults, she is my country still."