beyond my power of handling. Nor shall I so much as touch upon one branch of the subject, which does lie within the limit I have now prescribed for myself, namely, the imitation or the appropriation of Scripture imagery and expression. If on the one hand, we may well rejoice that English poetry has derived so much of its beauty and power from the Book of Divine Inspiration; there is too much cause to deplore, on the other, that the kindling narratives and lofty precepts of the Sacred Volume have been so often degraded by unworthy paraphrase, and diluted in the wretched versions of pretentious rhymesters. When to our admiration of the matchless poetry of the Book, we add the profounder feelings with which we regard it as the revelation of God's Will to man, it seems to say to all who have ears to hear,-"put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."

It cannot but be that this exclusion of the Classical, Foreign, and Scriptural elements from our enquiry, will very much lessen its scope; though I trust it will not be found to deprive it entirely of interest, nor even of some degree of profit.

The charge of plagiarism is one that is often made, against poetical and other writers;-not always, it must be confessed, without reason. But it is evident that there is a degree of resemblance, and even of imitation, which is perfectly allowable. There are no rights of property in thought. The floating fancy, or the profound speculation, is equally within the reach, (and therefore open to the appropriation) of all men similarly endowed; and a writer is not to be precluded from following out his own conception, because it happens to bring him upon ground which some predecessor or contemporary has trodden before him. When this is done with taste and judgment, it would be mere hypercriticism to condemn it. There are, also, avowed imitations, which give a zest and grace kindred to that which a happy quotation gives to a passage in prose. There are, besides, unconscious imitations, many of which it must have occurred to every attentive reader to notice, and some of which will come before us in the illustrations to be quoted hereafter. A rigid canon of exclusion would deprive our Literature of some of its chief ornaments. Many of our most eminent authors have purposely taken the plots and frame-work of other (sometimes inferior) writers, and made them their own. Chaucer, we know, took the idea of his Canterbury Tales from the Decameron of Boccaccio. Shakspeare appropriated dramas which he found ready to his hand, and turning them to

shapes which no other mind could have given them, sent them forth to endure, not for an age, but for all time. Sheridan, long afterwards, did the same; and so in one instance, did Coleridge. And these great writers I mention, not as standing alone in this matter, but because their fame has placed them before the world "in form and gesture proudly eminent." It is true that they did not refrain from touching the works of others; but it is equally true that they "touched nothing which they did not adorn."

There is another fact nearly connected with the subject under consideration, which may here be alluded to. The success of a particular author, or the popularity of a new style of composition, frequently begets imitators. There seems to be a fashion in the dress of human thought, which, like the more familiar modes of personal attire, is sometimes carried to a vicious extreme. Mackenzie's Man of Feeling was undoubtedly written in imitation of Sterne. The success of the Waverley Novels produced the Historical Romances of James, and others. When Bulwer chose a Highwayman for a Hero, he perhaps had little idea that Paul Clifford would prove the literary progenitor of Oliver Twist, or that Mr. Harrison Ainsworth would "better the instruction" of his master, by multiplying ad nauseam such books as Rookwood and Jack Sheppard. The sudden success which was achieved by Dickens under his pseudonyme of "Boz," brought into the field a host of other writers, who imitated the characteristic features of his style, and have not altogether failed to gain some reputation for their own merits. In poetry, there was, in the reign of Charles II., a French fashion. The court poets of the "Merry Monarch" drew more of their inspiration from Versailles than from Parnassus. Nearer to our own times, the German element has considerably influenced the poetry of this country. The legendary Ballads of Bürger and his contemporaries were imitated by Sir Walter Scott, and "Monk" Lewis. The loftier strains of German minstrelsy enkindled the poetic fire in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other Bards of our own or the last generation. The irregular, and yet constant measure of Christabel, found admirers and imitators in Scott, Byron, and Rogers. The metre of the Corsair and Jacqueline, is clearly formed upon the model which Coleridge had furnished.

The particulars now adverted to, describe, I think, the whole field of permissive imitation or appropriation. Beyond this, it becomes plagiarism -literary theft.

Here, in the original paper, follow the examples which were adduced to illustrate the preceding remarks. These extracts, which extended to a very considerable length, I do not think it necessary to repeat. They would not only occupy too much space, where space is very valuable, but would in a measure defeat the object with which this paper was written -that of suggesting an interesting subject of literary investigation, and leaving it to others to pursue.

I will content myself by giving some of the illustrations from Cowley, only. These will afford a sufficient specimen of the manner in which the subject was treated, and will also furnish some details supplementary to the Paper already referred to, concerning one of our native poets, who is less familiarly known than others whose names will follow.

I take the first extract from one of his amatory poems : "How could it be so fair, and you away?

How could the trees be beauteous, flowers so gay?

Could they remember but last year

How you did them, they you delight,

The sprouting leaves which saw you here,

And call'd their fellows to the sight,

Would, looking round for the same sight in vain,

Creep back into their silent barks again."

There are thousands of readers who never saw this passage in Cowley, who have been made perfectly familiar with the idea which it embodies by those well-known lines of Burns, beginning, "Ye banks and braes o' bonny Doon."

In the first poem of the collection entitled, "The Mistress," Cowley thus sings:

"Strike deep thy burning arrows in:

Lukewarmness I account a sin,

As great in love as in religion.

Come arm'd with flames, for I would prove,

All the extremities of mighty Tove,

Th' excess of heat is but a fable;

We know the torrid zone is now found habitable."

Among the contemporaries of Cowley, though an older man, was Thomas Carew. He died at the age of fifty, when Cowley had barely

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attained the age of twenty-one. To the elder writer may therefore be fairly conceded the credit of having been the originator of the thought or conceit which is common both to the passage just quoted, and the one which follows, from Carew's well-known song:

Give me more love, or more disdain;

The torrid, or the frigid zone,

Brings equal ease unto my pain:

The temperate affords me none :
Either extreme of love or hate

Is better than a calm estate."

Perhaps there is no couplet in our language more frequently quoted, either for approbation or reprobation, than this of Pope's :

"For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight,

His can't be wrong whose life is in the right."

The original of this is in Cowley. In his verses on the death of his friend and brother-poet, Richard Crashaw, who had left the Church of England, and died in the communion of the Church of Rome, he says:

"His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenents might

Be wrong: his life I'm sure was in the right."

In the Davideis is an expression which has been used by several subsequent writers :—

I think I remember the same thought in Southey's Thalaba:

"An everlasting Now of misery."

And in Talfourd's Athenian Captive, we have

"No! 'tis not past! the murderer has no PAST;

But one eternal PRESENT."

In The Wish, by Cowley, the fallowing is the concluding verse:—

"How happy here should I

And one dear she live, and embracing die;
She who is all the world, and can exclude

In desarts solitude,

I should have then this only fear,
Lest men, when they my pleasures see,
Should hither throng, to live like me,

And so make a city here."

Now, while retrospectively this reminds us of the description of Una, in his favourite Spenser, "whose angel's face," did make "a sunshine in a shady place;" it has had imitators in the nineteenth century. Do you remember that passage near the end of Childe Harold, beginning,

"O that the desert were my dwelling place,

With one fair spirit for my minister."

And can we not trace the same thought in that pretty verse of Moore's, in his Loves of the Angels:

"Throughout creation he but knew

Two separate worlds: the one-that small
Beloved and consecrated spot

Where Leah was: the other-all

The dull wide waste where she was not."

[The further illustrations included quotations from Shakspeare, Spenser, Donne, Southwell, George Herbert, Milton, Flatman, Bishops Jeremy Taylor and Ken, John Bunyan, Katharine Philips, Norris of Bemerton, Pope, Cowper, Burns, Goldsmith, Blair, Campbell, Coleridge, Southey, Moore, Byron, Talfourd, and P. J. Bailey. These however, for the reasons already given, I pass by. It is not by any means to be supposed that the field of enquiry was exhausted by the extracts which were read.]

Thus we have gone over and surveyed a large space in our National Literature, but omitting, purposely, all reference to any other poetry than our own. We have seen that, in some instances, the resemblance is rather in sound than in sense; in others, that it is in sense more than in sound; in some few, that the appropriation extends to both these; that, occasionally, the same simile is employed to illustrate a different subject: and again, that the same subject is embellished by a different metaphor. If we had gone into a lower rank of the literary profession, and instituted our right of search into Grub Street, we should have found, too probably, stolen property in abundance. Poets, like bees, have all the garden before them; it blooms with flowers to which they are all heartily and equally welcome, but the honey which they offer for our enjoyment should at least be their own.