Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."

After pausing on the last two fine verses, will not the reader smile that I should conjecture the image might originally have been discovered in the following humble verses in a poem once considered not as contemptible:

"A gentle lamb has rhetoric to plead,

And when she sees the butcher's knife decreed,
Her voice intreats him not to make her bleed."
Dr. KING'S "Mully of Mountown."

This natural and affecting image might certainly have been observed by Pope, without his having perceived it through the less polished lens of the telescope of Dr. King. It is, 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,"

VOL. IV.

L

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.”

TICKELL to Addison.

Evidently from the French Horace :

"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!"

Satyr II.

Doubtless at that moment echoed in his poetical ear the energetic and caustic epigram of Andrew Marvell, 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 seems a 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 modelle."

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 detruire, 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 guide and joy!"

Chamont employs the same image when speak

ing 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

Knit with the graces and the hours in dance

Led on th' eternal spring."

Paradise Lost.

Thomson probably caught this strain of

imagery:

"Sudden to heaven

Thence weary vision turns, where leading soft

The silent hours of love, with purest ray

Sweet Venus shines."

Summer, v. 1692.

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

"Lo, where the rosy-bosom'd hours

Fair Venus' train appear!"

Ode to Spring.

"Along the crisped shades and bowers
Revels the spruce and jocund spring;
The graces and the rosy-bosom'd hours
Thither all their bounties bring."

Comus, v. 984.

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 :