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

in one of Bishop Hall's "Epistles :”—

passage

"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

So fast they follow;"

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 "Religio Medici:"

"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 Penseroso:"

"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 :

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."

In his "Table Talk" Cowper has the couplet :

"That constellation set, the world in vain

Must hope to look upon their like again; "

which is adopted from the following in "Hamlet:"

"He was a man, take him for all in all,

I shall not look upon his like again.”

From "Hamlet," too, Churchill has borrowed the second line in this couplet

"And the poor slattern muse is brought to bed,
With all her imperfections on her head."

Shakspeare's words are:

"No reckoning made, but sent to my account,
With all my imperfections on my head."

Another remarkable thought in the "Task,"

"God made the country, and man made the town," is supposed to have been adopted from this line in Cowley's "Garden:"

"God the first garden made, the first city Cain."

But the true source of it will be found in a passage in Varro's "De Re Rusticâ," where he says:

“Nec mirum quod divina natura dedit agros, ars humana ædificavit urbes."

The temptation of borrowing must be strong indeed, when we meet with such a poet as

Chatterton giving way to it, notwithstanding the still stronger inducement which should have deterred him from venturing on such forbidden ground. But so it is; and among the many reasons for rejecting the authenticity of the Rowley Poems," not the least cogent is the occurrence therein of borrowed thoughts-borrowed from poets of a date posterior to that of their pretended origin. Of these I shall quote two or three instances. In the "Battle of Hastings" we read this couplet :

"The grey-goose pynion that thereon was sett,
Eftsoons wyth smokyng crymson bloud was wett."

This is taken from the ballad of 66
Chase:"-

"The grey-goose wing that was thereon

In his heart's blood was wet."

Chevy

In the same poem Chatterton has the lines:"Edardus felle upon the bloudie grounde;

His noble soule came rushyng from the wounde."

The last of which, with "disdainful" instead of "noble," is the concluding line in Dryden's translation of Virgil :—

"And the disdainful soul came rushing through the wound."

The same origin must be assigned to the following couplet in Sir Richard Blackmore; for, although Dryden's contemporary, Sir Richard