Sir Bulwer Lytton, in "England and the English:"

"The aristocratic influences have set up ridicule as the Criminal Code."

And Mrs. Gore in the following passage:

"Be vile, be prodigal, be false, but do not make yourself ridiculous: a butt or a bore ranks with the worst of criminals."

D'Israeli, in the " Literary Character," has this striking observation :—

"The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces;"

which Lord Byron quotes as a sample of D'Israeli's incomparable wisdom. It turns out, however, that the latter was indebted for the remark, such as it is, to Pope, who says in one of his letters to Swift:

"A few loose things sometimes fall from men of wit, by which censorious fools judge as ill of them as they possibly can, for their own comfort."

Goldsmith, in the "Citizen of the World,” has the same thought :—

"The folly of others is ever most ridiculous to those who are themselves the most foolish.'

And it occurs in Burke in this pithy form :

"Wisdom is not the most severe corrector of Folly."Reflections on the French Revolution.

In the same work Burke has this remark :

"Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation."

Which Sir Walter Scott has thus appropriated :

"Those ambitious of distinction are usually friends to innovation."-Life of Napoleon.

There is another remarkable thought in Burke, which Alison, the historian, has turned to good account. Indeed, it occurs so often in his disquisitions, that he seems to have made it the staple of all wisdom, and the basis of every truth. Burke's words are:

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

The following are some of the passages in which Alison has reproduced this beautiful sentiment, without condescending, in a single instance, to name the illustrious man from whom he has adopted it :

"Playfair traced in the revolution of our globe that mysterious system of action and reaction which pervades alike the moral and the material world."-History of Europe from the Fall of Napoleon.

"He has forgotten that action and reaction are the law of nature, not less in the moral than in the material world."Ibid.

"In the political not less than the physical world, action and reaction are equal and opposite."-Ibid.

"Action and reaction seems to be the law not less of the moral than the material world."—Ibid.

"The old law of nature is still in operation: action and reaction rule mankind."-Essay on the Year of Revolutions.

"Action and reaction is the law, not less of the intellectual than the physical world."—Essay on the Historical Romance.

The foregoing are some examples, from our prose writers, of borrowed thoughts and similes. It must be confessed, however, that it is not always easy to distinguish between actual borrowings, and such as are only so in appearance; between the thoughts which a writer has appropriated, and those which, being founded in nature, have naturally presented themselves to his mind. A deep-sighted thinker, one accustomed to serious meditation, will discover for himself what a man of ordinary capacity has to adopt from others. The one is a producer, the other a reproducer; the one an inventor, the other a copyist; the memory of the latter is stored with borrowed wealth; that of the former with original ideas, which haunt it,

"Like echoes of an antenatal dream."

A fruitful source of unconscious imitation is the word "sweet." Although its ordinary station is among the commonplaces of poetical diction, there is no expression that adapts itself, with such versatility and ease, to similitudes and to figurative language in general. It

appears to be specially suited to delineations of natural scenery, music, and love; and instances might be quoted from every poet, ancient or modern, which bear so close a resemblance to each other as to pass for imitations; yet which, in reality, are but echoes of Nature's universal voice, awakened in the poet's responsive breast.