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is more likely to have been the borrower on this occasion:

"A gloomy night o'erwhelms his dying eyes,

And his disdainful soul from his pale bosom flies."

There is a plagiarism in Chatterton which has escaped the notice of his numerous annotators, and which furnishes additional proof, if any were wanting, that the "Rowley Poems" are in reality the production of that "marvellous boy." It occurs at the commencement of the "Tournament," in the line,

"The worlde bie diffraunce ys ynn orderr founde."

It will be seen that this line, a very remarkable one, has been cleverly condensed from a passage in Pope's "Windsor Forest :"

"But as the world, harmoniously confused,

Where order in variety we see,

And where, though all things differ, all agree."

This sentiment has been repeated by other modern writers. Pope himself has it in the

66

Essay on Man," in this form :

"The lights and shades, whose well-accorded strife
Gives all the strength and colour of our life.'

It occurs in one of Pascal's "Pensées :"

"J'écrirai ici mes pensées sans ordre, et non pas peut-être dans une confusion sans dessein. C'est le véritable ordre, et qui marquera toujours mon objet par le désordre même.”

Bernardin de St. Pierre has it in his "Etudes

de la Nature :"

"C'est des contraires que résulte l'harmonie du monde.”

And Burke, in nearly the same words, in his "Reflections on the French Revolution :

"You had that action and counteraction which in the natural and the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe."

Nor does the sentiment belong exclusively to the moderns. I find it in Horace's twelfth Epistle:"

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"Nil parvum sapias, et adhuc sublimia cures,

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Quid velit et possit rerum concordia discors."

Lucan, I think, has the same expression in his "Pharsalia ;" and it forms the basis of Longinus's remark on the eloquence of Demosthenes :

“ Οὐκοῦν τὴν μὲν φύσιν τῶν ἐπαναφορῶν καὶ ἀσυνδέτων πάντῃ φυλάττει τῇ συνεχεῖ μεταβολῇ· οὕτως αὐτῷ καὶ ἡ τάξις ἄτακτον, καὶ ἔμπαλιν ἡ ἀταξία ποιὰν περιλαμβάνει τάξιν.”

It may be said that, as Pope adopted the thought from Horace or Lucan, so a poet of the fifteenth century (such as the supposed Rowley) might have taken it from the same sources. The supposition, however, of its having been borrowed from Pope is supported by the fact, that the line in the "Tournament" embraces not only the thought, but the very words in which Pope has expressed it.

One of the few good things in Crabbe happens to be a borrowed thought. In his "Tales of the Hall" he has the line,

"He tried the luxury of doing good;"

which is copied from this couplet in Garth's "Claremont :"

"Hard was their lodging, homely was their food,

For all their luxury was doing good."

There is a passage in Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," which has been traced to one of Butler's minor poems. Scott has it :—

"Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,

And man below and saints above,

For love is Heaven, and Heaven is love."

The lines in Butler are as follows:

"Translate to earth the joys above,

For nothing goes to Heaven but love."

I find, however, that the true source of Scott's lines may be traced to Dryden's "Palamon and Arcite:".

"The power of love

In earth, and seas, and air, and heaven above,
Rules unresisted;"

or perhaps to the line in Virgil:

"Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori;"

which Dryden has thus translated :—

"In hell, and earth, and seas, and heaven above,
Love conquers all, and we must yield to love."

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

"Excursion:”—

has another sample in the

"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."

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