Another of Scott's appropriations is the beautiful simile in the "Lady of the Lake:"

"With locks flung back and lips apart,

Like monument of Grecian art;"

for which he is indebted to these lines in Fletcher's "Purple Island:"

"Her sever'd lips seem'd cut in Grecian stone,
And all behind her flaxen locks were thrown."

The palpable plagiarisms in Wordsworth are not numerous. Before you can detect a borrowed thought in a writer, you must first detect the writer's meaning; and that is not always an easy task with a poet so impenetrably shrouded in mysticism as the Bard of Rydal Mount. Some of his thoughts, however, are traceable to other sources. Among these is the much-lauded sentiment,

"The child is father of the man,"

which might pass for original, if Dryden had not expressed the same thing when he said, in "All for Love:"

"Men are but children of a larger growth;"

or, as we have it in his fable of the "Cock and the Fox:"

"The nurses' legends are for truth received,

And the man dreams but what the boy believed;"

or, better still, in the last line of this passage in his "Hind and Panther:"

“By education most have been misled,

So they believe, because they so were bred :
The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man.”

Lloyd, in one of his Epistles, has the same thought, where he says:

"For men, in reason's sober eyes,

Are children but of larger size.”

Wordsworth has another sample in the "Excursion:"

“O many are the poets that are sown

By nature; men endow'd with highest gifts,

The vision and the faculty divine,

Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse;

Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led
By circumstances to take the height,
The measure of themselves."

This is but an amplification of a passage in one of Guarini's "Letters :".

"O quante nobili ingegni si perdono, che riuscerebbe mirabili, se dal seguir le inchinazione loro non fossero, o da loro appetiti ò da i Padri loro sviati."

There is also in the "Excursion" the oftquoted expression "another and the same:""By happy chance we saw

A twofold image; on a grassy bank

A snow-white ram, and in the crystal flood
Another and the same."

"Alme sol, curru nitido diem qui
Promis et celas, aliusque et idem
Nasceris."

Or perhaps from Bishop Hall's romance, bearing the quaint title of "Mundus alter et idem;" or more probably still, from this passage in Darwin's "Botanic Garden :"

"Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal nature lifts her changeful form;
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines another and the same.”

Then we have the passage in one of Wordsworth's "Sonnets:"

“The feather whence the pen

Was shaped, that traced the lives of these good men,
Dropt from an angel's wing;"

which has been traced to the following in a sonnet by Dorothy Berry :

"Whose noble praise

Deserves a quill pluckt from an angel's wing."

The same notion occurs in another Elizabethan poet, Henry Constable, who has these lines in one of his sonnets:

"The pen wherewith thou dost so heavenly sing,
Made of a quill pluckt from an angel's wing."

Lord Byron, in some instances, has had the honesty to refer to the sources of his appro

priations. There are, however, several unacknowledged samples in his poems, one of the most remarkable of which occurs in his beautiful prelude to the "Bride of Abydos:"

"Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime;
Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?
Know ye the land of the cedar and vine,

Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;
Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppress'd with perfume,
Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gull in her bloom;
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit,

And the voice of the nightingale never is mute ?"

This seems to have been adopted from a wild air sung by Mignon in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," the first stanza of which is as follows:

"Know'st thou the land where the lemon-trees bloom,
Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket's gloom,
Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows,
And the groves are of laurel, and myrtle, and rose ?
Know'st thou it ?

Thither, O thither,

My dearest and kindest, with thee would I go."

Another plagiarism in the "Bride of Abydos,” occurs in the couplet :

Mark, where his carnage and his conquests cease!

He makes a solitude and calls it-peace."

The second line is copied from Tacitus, where

he says:

"Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem adpellant."

Dryden, in his "Epistle to Dr. Charleton," has these remarkable lines on the aborigines of the new world:

"And guiltless men who danced away their time,

Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime."

And Byron, alluding to his favourite women in the old world, has a couplet which, in sense and sound, presents a close imitation of Dryden's :

"Heart on her lips and soul within her eyes,

Soft as her clime and sunny as her skies."

There is a line in Dryden which Byron has turned to account in the same fashion. "Alexander's Feast we read:

"Soothed with the sound, the king grew vain,
Fought all his battles o'er again.”

In

And in the fourteenth canto of "Don Juan:""The hunters fought their foxhunt o'er again."

The same may be said of a passage in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy:"—

"And as Praxiteles did by his glass, when he saw a scurvy face in it, brake it to pieces. But, for that one, he saw as many more as bad in a moment;"

which Byron has transferred to Harold: "

"E'en as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies; and makes
A thousand images of one that was,

"Childe

The same, and still the more the more it breaks."