COINCIDENCES OR PLAGIARISMS NOTED IN PASSING.

BY WILLIAM DOWE.

"Lengthened thoughts that gleam through many a page."

POPE.

DR. JOHNSON once projected a work, in which | At all times there have been tongues in trees, he meant to show what a small quantity of in- "airy tongues that syllabled men's lives," as vention served the purposes of literature, par- it were. The most venerable of bards, the ticularly poetic literature, at all times, and how | magni nominis umbra of Parnassus, Homer, or images and incidents have been repeated, from at least one of those successive Greek troubaage to age, ‚—a sort of dissertation upon Solo- dours, whose minstrelsy has been rolled tomon's text, that "there is nothing new under gether into one great name, has likened the the sun." It was a pity a man of such eru- transit and renewal of the human generations dition and strong critical sagacity, did not set to the leaves of trees. Pope thus renders the about the task. Ancient and modern poetry-passage:the modern poetry of England, at least-were as familiar to his mind as the furniture of his rooms-more so, perhaps; and no man could better track the metempsychosis of an idea, or an image, through the change of time and language, than himself. But he did not think it worth his while, perhaps, to spend his time, catching these eels of literature by the tail, and preferred the business of his dictionarya legacy which may well console us for the want of the other.

What Dr. Johnson could have done so completely and well, thousands of readers who have rambled in the fields of literature, native or exotic, have doubtless been in the habit of doing for themselves: recognising the various resemblances of poetic sentiment and imagery scattered over the domains of the muses. It is interesting to discover such coincidences, either to know how the same circumstances of life or nature impress different minds, or to detect a theft, however cunningly it may be concealed. Having met or remembered a few, in moments of too much literary idlesse, and with the sagacity of Captain Cuttle, "made a note" of them, we would take the good-natured reader-desiring none other-by the button, and ask him to throw away an hour with us in a gossip of poets, showing how they sympathized with, or borrowed, or stole from, one

another.

Some of the earliest dead leaves of autumn, whirled by a breeze from the west across the pathways of our famous Common-Boston Common, of course-suggest the old moral and likeness they have furnished for so many of

"Those bards sublime,

Whose distant footsteps echo

Through the corridors of Time,"

"Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,— They fall successive, and successive rise."

Dante, in that Hades of the Church, which he has made so terrible by the genius and revenge of an impassioned heart, compares the falling of souls, one by one, into the boat which carries them to judgment, to the lapse of autumn leaves from the boughs:

"Come d'autunno si levan le foglie

L'una appresso dell' altra, infin che l' ramo Rende alla terra tutte le sue spoglie, Similimente," &c.

Milton and Virgil have used the image to express a myriad of things. The former says:

"Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks Of Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades High overarched embower."

No man understood better than Milton that picturesque effect of names, whether of men or places; and he has, in the above, made the codicil of his resemblance beautiful by a dash of romantic association. Virgil, to express his idea of numerosity, has

"Quam multa in sylvis, autumni frigore primo, Lapsa cadunt folia."

Spenser makes one of the personages of his Faery Queen drive a crowd of his enemies before him,

"As withered leaves drop from their dried stocks

When the wroth western wind doth reave their locks."

Shelley reverses this same image of the west wind blowing the sere leaves; and instead of making it exemplify a more dignified act, exemplifies it thus:

"Thou wild west wind! thou breath of Autumn's being Before whose unseen presence the leaves dead

as well as of our modern "kings of melody." Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing."

Lord Byron, making a magnificent simile, says, with reference to the defeat of Sennacherib:

"Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with its banners at sunset was seen;
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown."

The fading away of the woodland foliage has always been more attractive and touching than the green glories of summer trees. The former illustrates with pathetic effect the destinies of men, and the moral of human life; and thus its solemn and softened picturesque and multitudinous decay has been so much employed in poetic imagery.

Campbell's noble poem, Lochiel's Warning, was doubtless suggested by the lines in Collins's Ode to Superstition, in which he speaks of the Scottish seers

"They raved, divining thro' their second sight,
Pale, red Culloden, where their hopes were drowned."

Gray's splendid historical ode, The Bard, is fashioned on the same warning principle. The idea is an old one. Louis de Leon, in his poem, makes the Genius of the Tagus put his sedgy head above the water to rebuke Roderigo, last of the Goths, in the arms of Cava or Florinda, whose father, Count Julian, on account of the dishonour done her by that king,

"First called the band That dyed Spain's mountain streams with Gothic gore."

In the Lusiad, Admastor, the spirit of the
Cape of Good Hope, is summoned from the
vasty deep, to hold parley with Vasco di
Gama,

"Who was the first that ever burst

Into the orient sea,"

"Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy"

the war of heroes, and the end of all, when the last blaze should send Ilion to the skies:

"Post certas hiemes, uret Achaïcus
Ignis Iliacas domos."

There is another passage in Campbell which would seem to be a plagiarism from Waller. The latter says:

"Others may use the ocean as their road,
Only the English make it their abode,-
We tread the billows with a steady foot."

Campbell adopts the thoughts of these itali-
cised words into the following, from the "Ma-
riners of England:"-

"Britannia needs no bulwark,

No towers along the steep;

Her march is on the mountain waves,
Her home is on the deep."

Apropos of Jenny Lind, whom we have just heard, and whose tones still

"Keep time to nothing in our head,

From some odd corner of the brain."

People call her a nightingale. We should like to hear her fairly pitted against "the Attic bird," for a "triumph of music." If, as Lyly intimates, "jug, jug, tereu," be the only notes of the latter

"Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu,' she cries,
And still her woes at midnight rise"-

we think the Scandinavian songster would prove
more than a match for her. It would be a
rare thing to hear their strife. Such a thing
has many times taken place, if we may credit
tradition. Sir William Jones records that a

It is a fact in natural history that birds will sing against each other. That they should sing against certain musical instruments seems, therefore, less extraordinary.

by way of the southern extremity of Africa. nightingale vied with a musician near Shiraz. For Necho, as Herodotus tells us, sent his ships round westerly, from the Persian Gulf, and Hanno's Periplus, on the Atlantic side, did not reach the Cape at all. All these poems and passages appear to have had their

Strada has written some Latin verses, re

original in the Prophecy of Nereus (Fifteenth cording the musical contest of a man with a

Ode of the First Book of Horace):-
:-

"Pastor cum traheret per freta navibus
Idæis Helenam," &c.

Nereus stopped the wind that was wafting
Helen and Paris in ships of Troy, and while

"The sea was calm, and on the level brine

Sleek Panope with all her sisters played,"

drew them a very faithful and forbidding picture of the consequences which should yet come of their elopement

lute, and a nightingale. In this he has been imitated by the English poet, Crashawe-one whom it has been the fashion to underrate a good deal. The Latin of Strada is close and simple, and ends with the defeat and death of the bird, which warbles its last in a vain attempt to rival the science of the instru

ment:

"Tuque etiam in modulos surgis, Philomela; sed impar
Viribus, huic impar, exanimisque cadis.
Durum certamen! Tristis victoria!" &c.

Crashawe's poem is full of quaint and spark

ling sentences. He seems to have thrown his heart into the strife he describes; and his lines exhibit something of the effort which may be supposed to belong to the musical antagonists. There is a certain amount of euphuism in Crashawe-an inevitable vice of his period-but this is amply compensated by the freshness and felicity of his thoughts and expressions. The Nightingale

"Opens the floodgates, and lets loose a tide

Of streaming sweetness, which in state doth ride,
Rising and falling in a pompous strain;
And while she thus discharges a shrill peal
Of flashing airs, she qualifies their zeal
With the cool epode of a graver note.
Her little soul is ravished, and so poured
Into loose ecstasies, that she is placed
Above herself-music's enthusiast."

| day, and the famous Augustan school, as it has been termed, might not have been at all; Pope and the rest might either have been unheard, or been heard speaking in a different fashion.

Talking of Pope, he draws a good many of his ideas from the brains of others. Bolingbroke, it is well known, suggested most of the arguments of the "Essay on Man." The couplet, for instance,

"And more true joy Marcellus, exiled, feels,
Than Cæsar with a senate at his heels,"

occurs, in a prosaic shape, in his lordship's writings. But Bolingbroke himself seems to have plagiarised the idea of it from Seneca ; who says, "O, Marcellus, happier when Brutus approved thy exile, than when the commonwealth approved thy consulship!" In the Es

The description of the Man has some happier say, Pope says: touches still:

"So said, his hands, sprightly as fire, he flings,
And with a quivering coyness tastes the strings.
From this to that, from that to this he flies,
Feels Music's pulse in all her arteries.
Fraught with a fury so harmonious,
The lute's light genius now does proudly rise,
Heaved on the surges of swollen rhapsodies," &c.

A good deal of effort in the elimination of his conceits may be discovered in this poet; but it cannot be denied that he dashes out, at times, some exquisite fragments of fancy and phraseology. What a delicate couplet we have here, in the first quoted, describing the Man! "Sprightly as fire" is new and most vivid; and the next line-never was there such an instance of happy onomatopeia! "Tastes the strings" is not euphuism. It is perfectly literal Taster is the old French of to touch;

the modern word drops the s by a very general neologic rule. The conceit of "feeling Music's pulse in all her arteries," is a line of the same bold and felicitous kind.

In reading the verse of our older poets and dramatists, you cannot but feel how much finer and fresher was their style than that of the

classic rhetoric which came afterwards into Vogue. And in spite of

"The long, majestic march, and energy divine,"

"Superior beings, when of late they saw
A mortal man unfold all Nature's law,
Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And showed a Newton, as we show an ape."

This nearly approaches the contemptuous opi-
nion expressed by Raphael, in Paradise Lost,
where he speaks of the presumptuous men who
will attempt to scan God's astronomical crea-
tion:

"If they list to try

Conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens
Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide,
Hereafter; when they come to model heaven,
And calculate the stars, how they will wield
The mighty frame; how build, unbuild, contrive
To save appearances; how gird the sphere
With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er,
Cycle, and epicycle, orb in orb!"

for the lumbering old system of Ptolemy, which
This piece of archangelic satire was intended
held its supremacy up to the days of Coperni-

cus.

But Milton seems to have adopted this idea of supernal scorn of man's scientific groping, from the work of the Italian, Marcello Palingenio, printed at Ferrara in 1531, and called the Zodiacus Vita. In this the author says that the man who scrutinises the planetary bodies and the laws of nature, will be the ape of the celestials, the laughing-stock of the gods, even in this world:

"Simia cœlicolum risusque jocusque deorum est Tunc homo, cum temere ingenio confidit et audet Abdita naturæ scrutari, arcanaque rerum."

of Dryden, and the splendid verse of Pope, we are disposed to think that English poetic literature would now be more racy of the soil, and still worthier of our civilization, if the discreditable Gallican influences of Charles the If all this were true, Galileo, Herschell, Rosse, Second's reign had not overflowed the fields of Leverrier, and the rest of "those earthly godour poetry with the exotic spirit of classic fathers of heaven's lights," could or can exantiquity, filtered through the artificial and pect very little reward of their labours at the slavish literature of France. Had it been hands of the calicoli; who must, in particular, otherwise, we might now have our Coleridges, have laughed very heartily lately, to see Lord Shelleys, Keatses, Byrons, &c., of an earlier | Rosse building and polishing at Parsonstown,

man afterwards offered to serve him with his
patronage in bringing out the Dictionary, just
as Johnson had toiled painfully, and often im-
pransus, to Z; but the scholar refused, growl-
ing out, "When I have circumnavigated the
world of the British language, he sends a cock-
boat to tow me into harbour!"
Pope's lines,

"What woful stuff this madrigal would be,
In some starved hackney sonnetteer, or me!" &c.,

"Tous les discours sont des sottises
Partant d'un homme sans eclât;
Ce seraient parolles exquises,
Si c'etait un grand qui parlat."

in Ireland, a huge telescope, which was at last to demolish and do away with that Nebular Theory which his friends, Herschell and Nichol of Glasgow, had spent such trouble in building up to the constellation of Orion, from the Shinar, so to speak, of a very daring hypothesis. These astronomers thought they had made out the birth and progress, the Genesis, of the heavenly bodies, when they had seen, with the strongest telescopes they could afford, a certain opaque luminosity in Orion, and could make nothing distinct of it. They concluded only contain the sentiment of Molière :it must be some blind, wandering nebulous matter, from which the regular bodies were gradually evolved-the star-dust and raw material, as it were, of the host of heaven. And thus they raised up their very bold and attractive synthesis, through all the phases and transitions of the floating nebulæ, arguing all the while from recognised laws, till they came to the bright consummate star, moving in sublime obedience to the cosmical order of the universe. It was a great thing to hear, as we have heard, Professor Nichol set forth his theory in his own high poetic style, unmindful of the enormous tube which Rosse was even then pointing at the penetralia of heaven; and which, when fixed upon the aforesaid nebulosity, discovered, not the "raw material," and Nature in her workshop, doing it up into astronomy, but, crowds of full-grown, rounded, regular, and infinitely remote orbs, swimming about in the abysses of a further firmament! Down came the beautiful theory! But the splinters of it were admirable, even in their ruin.

Herschell had shot an arrow like that of Virgil's Acestes, which, missing its aim, and swerving in magnificent error away through space, yet described an arch of true science in its course, and carried a prodigious brilliancy, and the astonished eyes of men, along with it;-just as it has carried ourselves away at present from our subject of literary plagiarism.

To return to Pope. In the Dunciad he has the line:

Molière adopted it from the old Latin poet, Ennius, who doubtless took it, in turn, from Euripides; who took it from-we forget what Pelasgian, cotemporary with Japheth. Emerson seems to be the last notability who has expressed the sentiment, where he says that, "It adds a great deal to the force of an opinion to know that there is a man of mark and likelihood behind it."

Apropos of Molière. The words uttered by Sosie, in the Amphitryon, and so universally quoted,

"Le veritable Amphitryon

Est l'Amphitryon ou l'on dine,”

were taken from Rotrou, an author who wrote before Molière. Rotrou has almost the same expression negatively :

:

"Point d'Amphitryon, ou l'on ne dine pas."

Pope takes from Cowley in the following,—

"For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right."

Cowley has it:

"His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right." Pope, in the line,

"Is it a crime in heaven to love too well?" imitates Crashawe's couplet:

"A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits." This smart piece of antithesis he has borrowed from Quinctilian, who, speaking of certain people, says, "Qui stultis eruditi videri volunt; eruditis stulti videntur." Dr. Johnson, also, whose powerful memory often helped him to his good things, hurled this pointed missile at the head of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, calling him, with great applause, "A lord among wits, and a wit among lords." His lordship had offended the rugged lexicographer, whose barbarous manners in company Chesterfield holds up, in his Letters to The latter calls on God, with the characterhis son, as things to be avoided. The noble-istic fervour of France.

"And I-what is my crime? I cannot tell, Unless it be a crime to have loved too well." Lamartine, in his Jocelyn, has the same expression:

"Est ce un crime, O mon Dieu, de trop aimer le beau?"

Shakespeare has fed a host of plagiarists. | from whom many makers and builders have But Shakespeare plagiarised himself, from quarried their materials. others, yet by the alchymy of true genius he turned all sorts of dross into gold, and embellished every thought he adopted. We perceive Tennyson has pilfered one fine, fanciful thought of his, which is to be found in the Merchant of Venice. Alfred speaks of

Lord Byron, (whom we have just quoted,) seems, for all that scornful way of his, to have poached in some measure on the manors of others. He has, indeed, said in one of his letters, that pretensions to originality are ludicrous; but, like Shakespeare, he commutes everything he adopts. He turns with fine effect into the Childe Harold stanza, Filicaja's celebrated sonnet on Italy:

"Italia, Italia, o tu cui feo la sorte," &c.

Italia, O Italia, thou who hast

The fatal gift of beauty, &c.

Also that stanza, in the first canto of Don
Juan-the most delightful of its kind, cer-

In Dryden's Palemon and Arcite you are tainly, in the language-paraphrased from struck with the bold conceit of the lines,

"A generous chillness seizes every part,

The blood flies back to fortify the heart."

But look for it in Shakespeare; it must be found in that storehouse of all sentiment. Warwick, in Henry VI., says:—

"Oft have I seen a timely-parted ghost

Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless,
Being all descended to the labouring heart,
Which, in the conflict that it holds with death,
Attracts the same for aidance 'gainst the enemy."

what is supposed to be the Greek of Sappho:

"O Hesperus, thou bringest all good things;
Home to the weary, to the hungry, cheer;
To the young bird the parent's brooding wings;
The welcome stall to the o'erlaboured steer;
Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings,
Whate'er our household gods protect of dear,
Is gathered round us by thy look of rest;
Thou bringest the child, too, to the mother's breast."

Byron had an exquisite sense of the graceful in Anglo-Saxon; and he has sweetly rendered into our tongue and into our feelings, as it were, the rural and household charm of this

The military figure of Shakespeare's musical old fragment. The following sentiment in the lines,

"Beauty's ensign yet

Is crimson on her lips and in her cheeks,
And Death's pale flag is not advanced there,”—

is closely imitated by Chamberlain in his Pharronidas,

"The rose had lost His ensign in her cheeks; and tho' it cost Pains nigh to death, the lily had alone Set his pale banners up."

Milton says of philosophy, that it is

"As musical as is Apollo's lute."

Byron, in Love's Labour Lost, says of love, that it is

"As sweet and musical

As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair."

But it would be an endless task to note every

second canto of Childe Harold,—

"A thousand years scarce serve to form a state, An hour may lay it in the dust,”—

is taken from a passage in Muratori's Annals, to wit:-"Cento si richieggono ad edificare; un solo basta per distruggere tutto." The lines in the beginning of the third canto,

"For I am as a weed Flung from the rock, on ocean's foam to sail Where'er the surge may sweep, or tempest's breath prevail,”—

strongly resemble Horace's,

"Quo me cunque rapit, tempestas deferor hospes."

In the Prophecy of Dante he says:—

"Many are poets who have never penned
Their inspiration-and perhaps the best."

thing that has been stolen from the 'Swan's Wordsworth has the same sentiment:-
fumier-or dung-hill, as Voltaire calls it—with
such an air of superiority! Shakespeare is
more like a Coliseum,

"From whose mass Walls, palaces, half cities, have been reared;"

"O many are the poets that are sown
By nature," &c.

But Bacon, whose thoughts had something of the universality of Shakespeare's, said the