Gray has it:

"With haggard eyes the poet stood;

Loose his beard and hoary hair

Stream'd like a meteor to the troubled air."

Campbell, in his "Pleasures of Hope," has also borrowed this simile :

"Where Andes, giant of the western star,

With meteor standard to the winds unfurl'd.”

Another appropriation in Gray is the wellknown apothegm at the close of the following lines, in his "Ode on a Prospect of Eton College:"

"Yet ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,

And happiness too swiftly flies.

Davenant has the same idea in the lines:

"Then ask not bodies doom'd to die

To what abode they go;

Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy,

'Tis better not to know."

But it is still more obviously assignable to

Prior :

Seeing aright we see our woes,

Then what avails us to have eyes?
From ignorance our comfort flows,
The only wretched are the wise.'

The true source, after all, of this thought, as indeed of all human wisdom, must be traced to a higher authority than any poet, ancient or modern. Ecclesiastes, i. 18, expresses it in fewer words than any author that has been quoted :— "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

To Milton, Gray is indebted for another of his beautiful images. The former, speaking of the Deity, says :

"Dark with excessive light thy skirts appear."

And Gray, with true poetic feeling, has applied
this image to Milton himself, in those forceful
lines in the "Progress of Poesy," in which he
alludes to the poet's blindness :—

"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."

Shelley has imitated this in the following lines in
"Julian and Maddalo :"-

"The sense that he was greater than his kind
Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind,
By gazing on its own exceeding light."

There is a passage in Longinus which appears to have furnished Milton with the germ of this thought. The Greek rhetorician is commenting on the use of figurative language, and after

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illustrating his views by a quotation from Demosthenes, he adds:

“ Τίνι γὰρ ἐνταῦθ ̓ ὁ ῥήτωρ ἀπέκρυψε τὸ σχῆμα ; δῆλον, ὅτι τῷ φωτὶ αὐτῷ.”

"In what has the orator here concealed the figure ? plainly, in its own lustre."

In this passage Longinus elucidates one figure by another; a not unfrequent practice with that elegant writer.

Lastly, we have the quatrain in Gray's "Ode to Adversity :'

"Daughter of Jove, relentless power,

Thou tamer of the human breast,

Whose iron scourge and tort'ring hour

The bad affright, afflict the best."

For the third line of which he is indebted to this passage in "Paradise Lost:"_

When the scourge

Inexorably and the torturing hour
Calls us to penance."

If any work more than another might be expected to furnish information on the subject of "plagiarism," it is D'Israeli's "Curiosities of Literature." Yet, although the subject is there introduced under the head of "Richesource and his Professorship," not a single example is adduced of so remarkable a "Curiosity." This is not a little surprising in a writer who appears to have bestowed so much industry and patience

on his other researches. True, we find farther on some twenty-five pages of "Imitations," and "Similarities;" but one half of these have no better claim to that distinction than the trivial coincidence of a single word or epithet; a claim which, if strictly enforced, would exhibit all the poetry in our language as made up of similarities. There are, however, three of the "Imitations which deserve to be quoted.

The first occurs in Pope's "Prologue to the Satires," where, speaking of Dr. Arbuthnot, he

says:

"Friend of my life (which did not you prolong,

The world had wanted many an idle song)."

The thought in the second line being adopted from this couplet in Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel :"

"David for him his tuneful harp had strung,

And Heaven had wanted one immortal song."

The second imitation refers to a couplet in Young:

"Of some for glory such the boundless rage,

That they're the blackest scandal of the age."

Which is taken from the following in Oldham's "Satire against Poetry:❞—

"On Butler who can think without just rage ?
The glory and the scandal of the age."

The third imitation noticed by D'Israeli,

occurs in a couplet in Goldsmith's "Deserted Village : "

"Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;

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

The second line of which he traces to a passage in De Caux, who, comparing the world to his hour-glass, says :

"C'est un verre qui luit,

Qu'un souffle peut détruire, et qu'un souffle a produit.”

The following quatrain, commemorating the devastating effects of an earthquake in the valley of Lucerne, in 1808, offers a parallel :

"O ciel! ainsi ta Providence

A tous les maux nous condamna;

Un souffle éteint notre existence,
Comme un souffle nous la donna."

And Pope has a couplet in which the same turn of thought is preserved :

"Who pants for glory finds but short repose;
A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows."

There is a plagiarism in Goldsmith which, I believe, was first pointed out by the "Athenæum" newspaper. It relates to this couplet in the "Haunch of Venison:"

"Such dainties to them their health it might hurt;

It's like sending them ruffles when wanting a shirt."