Parallel Passages. INCLUDING IMITATIONS, PLAGIARISMS, AND ACCIDENTAL COINCIDENCES. Pretensions to originality are ludicrous.-BYRON'S Letters. An apple cleft in two is not more twin Than these two creatures.-Twelfth Night, V. 1. Milton "borrowed" other poets' thoughts, but he did not borrow as gipsies borrow children, spoiling their features that they may not be recognized. No, he returned them improved. Had he "borrowed" your coat, he would have restored it with a new nup upon it!-LEIGH HUNT. Man wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long.-GOLDSMITH: Hermit. Evidently stolen from DR. YOUNG: Man wants but little, nor that little long.-Night Thoughts. Be wise to-day: 'tis madness to defer.-Night Thoughts. But CONGREVE had said, not long before, Defer not till to-morrow to be wise; To-morrow's sun to thee may never rise.-Letter to Cobham. Like angels' visits, few and far between.-CAMPBELL: Pleasures of Hope. Copied from BLAIR :— like an ill-used ghost, Not to return; or if it did, its visits, Like those of angels, short and far between.-Grave. But this pretty conceit originated with NORRIS, of Bemerton, (died 1711,) in a religious poem : But those who soonest take their flight Are the most exquisite and strong: Like angels' visits, short and bright, Mortality's too weak to bear them long.-The Parting. Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes, Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart.-GRAY's Bard. GRAY himself points out the imitation in SHAKSPEARE: You are my true and honorable wife; As dear to me as are the ruddy drops That visit my sad heart.-Julius Cæsar, Act II. Sc. 1. OTWAY also makes Priuli exclaim to his daughter, Dear as the vital warmth that feeds my life, Dear as these eyes that weep in fondness o'er thee.- Venice Preserved. And leave us leisure to be good.-GRAY: Ode to Adversity. And know, I have not yet the leisure to be good.-OLDHAM. Thou tamer of the human breast, Whose iron scourge and torturing hour The bad affright, afflict the best.-GRAY: Ode to Adversity. Inexorably, and the torturing hour, Calls us to penance.-MILTON: Paradise Lost. Lo, where the rosy-bosomed hours, Fair Venus' train, appear!-GRAY: Ode to Spring. Thither all their bounties bring.-MILTON: Comus. Full many a gem, of purest ray serene, The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.-GRAY: Elegy. There kept my charms concealed from mortal eye, Like roses that in deserts bloom and die.-POPE: Rape of the Lock. In distant wilds, by human eye unseen, She rears her flowers and spreads her velvet green; Pure gurgling rills the lonely desert trace, And waste their music on the savage race.-YOUNG. And, like the desert's lily, bloom to fade.-SHENSTONE: Elegy IV. Nor waste their sweetness on the desert air.-CHURCHILL, Gotham. Which else had wasted in the desert air. LLOYD: Ode at Westminster School And leaves the world to darkness and to me.-GRAY: Elegy. The swallow oft beneath my thatch -Mess: Beggar's Petition. Shall twitter from her clay-built nest, &c.-The Wish. Doubtless suggested to ROGERS by the lines in GRAY's Elegy:- The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, The swallow twittering from her straw-built shed, &c. The bloom of young desire and purple light of love.-GRAY. And quaff the pendent vintage as it grows. GRAY: Alliance of Education and Government. For this expression GRAY was indebted to VIRGIL :— Non eadem arboribus pendet vindemia nostris, &c.—Georg. ii. 89. The attic warbler pours her throat.-GRAY: Ode to Spring. Is it for thee the linnet pours her throat?-POPE: Essay on Man. GRAY says concerning the blindness of Milton,He passed the flaming bounds of space and time: The living throne, the sapphire blaze, Where angels tremble while they gaze, He saw; but, blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night. (DR. JOHNSON remarks that if we suppose the blindness caused by study in the formation of his poem, this account is poctically true and happily imagined.) HERMIAS, a Galatian writer of the second century, says of Homer's blindness, When Homer resolved to write of Achilles, he had an exceeding desire to fill his mind with a just idea of so glorious a hero: wherefore, having paid all due honors at his tomb, he entreats that he may obtain a sight of him. The hero grants his poet's petition, and rises in a glorious suit of armor, which cast so insufferable a splendor that Homer lost his eyes while he gazed for the enlargement of his notions. (POPE says if this be any thing more than mere fable, one would be apt to imagine it insinuated his contracting a blindness by too intense application while he wrote the Iliad.) HUME's sarcastic fling at the clergy in a note to the first volume of his history is not original. He says, The ambition of the clergy can often be satisfied only by promoting ignorance, and superstition, and implicit faith, and pious frauds; and having got what Archimedes only wanted,-another world on which he could fix his engine, no wonder they move this world at their pleasure. In DRYDEN'S Don Sebastian, Dorax thus addresses the Mufti : Content you with monopolizing Heaven, DRYDEN says of the Earl of Shaftesbury, David for him his tuneful harp had strung, And Heaven had wanted one immortal song.-Absalom and Achitophel. POPE adopts similar language in addressing his friend Dr. Arbuthnot: Friend of my life! which did not you prolong, The world had wanted many an idle song. For truth has such a face and such a mien, As to be hated needs but to be seen.-POPE. Great wits to madness nearly are allied.-DRYDEN: Abs. and Achit. SENECA said, eighteen centuries ago, Nullum magnum ingenium absque mistura dementia est:-De Tranquil.; and Aristotle had said it before him (Problemata). Praise undeserved is satire in disguise.-POPE: Imit. Horace. SIR WALTER SCOTT says in his Woodstock,-in the scene where Alice Lee, in the presence of Charles II. under the assumed name of Louis Kerneguy, describes the character she supposes the king to have: Kerneguy and his supposed patron felt embarrassed, perhaps from a consciousness that the real Charles fell far short of his ideal character as designed in such glowing colors. In some cases exaggerated or inappropriate praise becomes the most severe satire. Ye little stars, hide your diminished rays.-POPE: Epistle to Bathurst. Hide their diminished heads.-MILTON. Laugh where we must, be candid where we can, But vindicate the ways of God to man.-POPE: Essay on Man. On Butler who can think without just rage, At length Erasmus, that great injured name, The glory of the priesthood and the shame.-Essay on Criticism. And more true joy Marcellus, exiled, feels, Than Cæsar with a senate at his heels.-POPE: Essay on Man. Drawn from BOLINGBROKE, who plagiarized the idea from SENECA, who says,— O Marcellus, happier when Brutus approved thy exile than when the commonwealth approved thy consulship. For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight: He can't be wrong whose life is in the right.-POPE: Essay on Man. Taken from COWLEY: His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might Be wrong: his life, I'm sure, was in the right. Is it, in heaven, a crime to love too well?-POPE: Elegy. Imitated from CRASHAWE's couplet: And I,-what is my crime? I cannot tell, Unless it be a crime to have loved too well. LAMARTINE, in his Jocelyn, has the same expression :- A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits.-Dunciad. This smart piece of antithesis POPE borrowed from QUINCTILIAN, who says, Qui stultis eruditi videri volunt; eruditi stulti videntur. DR. JOHNSON also hurled this missile at Lord Chesterfield, calling him "A lord among wits, and a wit among lords." The earl had offended the rugged lexicographer, whose barbarous manners in company Chesterfield holds up, in his Letters to his son, as things to be avoided. Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare, And beauty draws us with a single hair.-POPE: Rape of the Lock. This has a strong affinity with a passage in HoWELL'S Letters : 'Tis a powerful sex: they were too strong for the first, for the strongest, and for the wisest man that was: they must needs be strong, when one hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen. Princes and lords may flourish or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made.-GOLDSMITH: Deserted Vil. Probably from DE CAUX, an old French poet, who says,- C'est un verre qui luit, Qu'un souffle peut détruire, et qu'un souffle a produit. |