The thoughts contained in the italicised lines may form an apology for the length of this quotation.

But another poet, somewhat less known than even the little-known Donne, had before him adorned his verses with the same image. That poet-no indifferent one, though of little reputation in Europe-is the famous Persian, Hakim Umar Khayyam. Born in the latter half of the eleventh century, this "tentmaker," as his name signifies, distinguished himself alike as a philosopher and a mathematician. In one of his Rubayyat, or "Quatrains," he wrote

O my soul! I and you are the similitude of a pair of compasses;
Although we make two heads we possess but one body;

At present we move round one point in a circle,
Afterwards we shall again surely come together.

It is uncertain to whom Khayyam addressed his quatrain. It may be to a heavenly, or, as is much more likely, to an earthly love. Dr. Johnson seems not to have approved of this singular comparison. Regarding the other leg of Donne's compasses as his wife, he is in doubt whether the idea be more remarkable for ingenuity or absurdity.

Another Rubayyat of Khayyam offers a coincidence with some verses of Tennyson. Quoth Umar, likening life to a game of chess,

We are the pieces, and Destiny plays the game;
This is a matter of fact and no metaphor;
We are the puppets on the chess-board of being,
And go back one by one into the box of annihilation.

Compared with this early Persian poem, divested as it necessarily must be for the English reader of all its native verbal grace and poesy, what a lapse of energy and earnestness of expression is to be lamented in the lines of our Poet-Laureate, set in the mouth of Maud's unlucky lover!

Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at a game
That pushes us off from the board, and others ever succeed.

The reader will scarcely need to be reminded of the same illustration in the mouth of Sancho Panza, who caps his master's comparison of all the world to a stage, by saying it is also as in the game of chess; while the game lasts each piece has its own particular office, but as soon as the game is over, all the pieces are mixed up together and cast higgledypiggledy into a bag, which is all one, says Sancho, with casting our dead bodies into the tomb.

In the drama of Jonson already referred to, one of the puns reminds us of Crashaw. Quoth Maid Marian to Robin Hood, "You are a wanton;" to which Robin replies, "One, I do confess, I wanted till you came." The same play on words, which will be rendered better if we remember the old pronunciation of "one," occurs in Crashaw's Steps to the Temple, who, in a version of the Twenty-third Psalm, speaking of himself under the similitude of a sheep, sings :

Plenty wears me at her breast,
Whose sweet temper teaches me
Nor wanton, nor in want to be.

A line in the prologue to the same drama reminds us of Donne :—

What knows the head

Of a calm river whom the feet have drowned!

says the Prologue, referring to Eglamour's supposed loss of his lady, Earine, in the Trent. The author of Biathanatos, that remarkable justification of suicide, compact of equal audacity and wit, speaking of Justice, in verses unusually harmonious, thus apostrophises her :—

Greatest and fairest Empress, know you this!

Alas! no more than Thames' calm head doth know

Whose meads her arms drown, or whose corn o'erflow.

In Cynthia's Revels, or the Fountain of Self-Love, the plot of which play, it has been said, is so finely spun that no eye perhaps but Jonson's has ever been able to trace it, the optics of the well-dieted Amorphus have drunk the spirit of beauty in some eight score and eighteen princes' courts, where he has been fortunate in the amours of three hundred forty and five ladies, all nobly, if not princely descended; whose names, he adds in confirmation, he has in catalogue. Leporello, in La Porte's wellknown version of the Don Juan story, which was copied from Tirso de Molina (Gabriel Tellez) by Molière, T. Corneille, Shadwell, and Goldoni, introducing to the notice of the deceived Elvira a catalogue of the ladies his master had loved, speaks of six hundred and forty in Italy, and one thousand and three in Spain, among them countesses, baronesses, marchionesses, princesses, and so on, as every reader will remember.

Good Master Fenton, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, dreading the result even of such feeble wooing of sweet Anne Page as that of Slender, when supported by her father's authority, and not quite secure against Dr. Caius, when countenanced by her mother, says he must "advance the colours of his love and not retire." Romeo, addressing the sleeping Juliet, says beauty's

Ensign is crimson in her lips, and in her cheeks,

And death's pale flag is not advanced there.

Marini, in one of his Lugubrious Rhymes, has the same remarkable image. His heavenly lady, or rather earthly goddess, lay on her bed with her fair eyes closed in everlasting evening, while her mournful lover was weeping by her side

Morte la'nsegna sua pallida e bianca
Vincitrice spiegò sul volto mio.

He, says Tennyson, never tasted pure love who first flung the bitter seed among mankind:

VOL. XXXVIII.-NO. 226.

23.

That could the dead, whose dying eyes
Were closed with wail, resume their life,
They would but find in child and wife
An iron welcome when they rise.

If the poet did not borrow his observation from Sadi, there is certainly a very curious coincidence between him and the author of the Gulistan. That ancient writer showed no little knowledge of human nature in these lines

Oh! if the dead man might come again,

Among the members of his race and of his kindred;

The return of the inheritance would be harder
To the heir than the death of his relation!

There are, as indeed might easily be supposed, some wonderfully exact parallels to the idea of the author of Ecclesiastes, who praised the dead more than the living, and considered the man who had not yet been as far better off than both of them. A literal translation of one of the Gnomic sentences of Theognis runs thus :-"For mortals the very best thing of all is not to be born, or look on the light of the piercing sun; but being born, it is best to pass as quickly as possible to the portals of Hades, and lie hidden under a large heap of earth." In one of the choruses in the Edipus Coloneus, we find that for a person never to have been born beats everything; but, if he appears at all, then by far the next best thing is to return as quickly as may be whence he came. The advice given by the captive Silenus to King Midas, in return for his liberation, was that by far the best for man is not to be born, the next best as soon as possible to die. And though Lactantius exclaims against the ineptitude of this opinion, and thinks it worthily set in the mouth of such a one as Silenus, it is supported by Pliny, Ausonius, Seneca, Alexis, and many more authorities than the reader would probably care to consult.

Such coincidences of thought are so numerous and so frequent that they seem to require no further notice than has been already bestowed upon them. Even in these plagiarism is not seldom scented by keener noses. The liberal Dr. Johnson, for instance, accuses the "out-of-fashion" Cowley, as Lamb calls him in his letter to Coleridge, of obligations to Grotius and Donne. Sir John Denham has, however, shown the improbability of the charge. Indeed, the author of Cooper's Hill directly states that, although no author was unknown to Cowley, yet "what he writ was all his own." Swift also, by-the-bye, in his verses on his own death, says he was never known to steal a hint, but "what he writ was all his own." Here, then, is a case in which Denham's anxiety to save Cowley from any imputation of borrowing, and Swift's modest consciousness of his own entire innocence in that respect, have curiously enough given rise to precisely the same expression of independent thought. A better example could not easily be found to show how an analogous or identical subject may suggest not only similar ideas, but exactly the same words.

There is much verbal likeness between some of the prayers of his

Majesty King Charles I. and those of King David according to Milton; but this "borrowing," as he calls it, is inconsiderable when confronted with another likeness in Charles's devotions to Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which the same Milton stigmatises as theft. The naughty widow Cecropia, in that novel, listening, after her own ungracious method of subtle proceeding, outside the door of Pamela's chamber, hears her utter a certain prayer. This very prayer, says the author of the Eikonoklastes, by a gross cozenage, was popped into the hand of the grave Bishop Juxon by the monarch as his own composition, in the very moment of his death, and afterwards published in the Eikon Basilike. It is indeed the fact that the two prayers are word for word alike. Milton will not on this occasion allow any possibility of double inspiration or new invention, but roundly abuses the King for filching in his bankrupt devotion an orison of a heathen praying to a heathen, from a vain amatorious poem. He seems to think that the blessed martyr ought to have had recourse, wanting prayers of his own, to the Christian Liturgy, instead of offering up a réchauffe of an ethnic petition to a buzzard idol. The rest of his petition may have been borrowed, adds the ingenuous poet, from the Lord knows where. Perhaps from the French Astræa, perhaps from the Spanish Diana-Amadis and Palmerin would hardly scape him. Milton, it must be remembered, had a grudge against his most gracious sovereign; but others, apparently from pure natural malice, have set Charles and his chaplain in the same condemnation. These hissing serpents which surround the cradle of genius assert that, if the King filched aught, he did but follow the example of his holy father. Jeremy Taylor, in his Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, speaking of the best and most passionate sermons that were ever preached, the sermons on the stones of sepulchres, tells us that the kings of Spain lived and were buried in the same Escurial-a circumstance one would imagine hostile to good health, however adminicular to morality. Our own kings are contented with being crowned in Westminster Abbey, the mausoleum of their predecessors. There, says the British Chrysostom, is "an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change, from living like gods to die like men." The Chaplain in Ordinary to the first Charles was remarkable for the original lustre of his diction, which may be compared, to use his own words, to the shine of a dove's back, or the glistening image of a rainbow; but Francis Beaumont, who died when Taylor was a baby, chancing to hit on the same idea before him, has expressed it with almost equal elegance. After saying, in his poem on the tombs in Westminster, that the potentates buried there preach from their pulpits, sealed with dust, the vanity of all earthly ambition, he adds :

Here's an acre sown indeed

With the richest royalest seed,

Here the bones of birth have cried,

Though gods they were, as men they died.

All that the charitable reader will perceive in these, and many more

passages like these, is a curious coincidence. Such a coincidence with other writers occurs frequently enough in Milton himself. Not to mention his often concurrence with ancient and foreign authors, here is an instance of similarity to one of his own country, and but little before his time. The imperial ensign of that tall cherub Azazel, advanced full high over the hosts of the fallen Archangel, shone "like a meteor streaming to the wind." The loose beard and hoary hair of Gray's Bard, also, by the way, "streamed like a meteor to the troubled air." This coincidence has been more frequently noted than the resemblance of both passages to a line in Heywood's Four Prentices of London, written certainly not later than the last year of the sixteenth century. Turnus, the envoy of the Persian Sophy, speaking of his master's victorious flag, that hangs blowing defiance on Sion towers, tells us that it shows

Like a red meteor in the troubled air.

Whether Milton unconsciously copied Heywood, or whether Gray uncon sciously copied Milton, is of course uncertain. Thoughts, it has been often said, are like materials in a mosaic, less admirable in themselves than in their arrangement. But in this case the difference in the arrangement is exceedingly small. Filtered through a new medium, the old liquid has not put on a new appearance. Neither Gray nor Milton has changed Heywood's copper into gold. This is not the case of a form of mud afterwards animated with fire from heaven; as much fire as the thought seems capable of containing was given to it in its creation by the author of the Four Prentices. In neither of its succeeding avatars bas it caught any more.

Waller in some verses to Charles's Queen, occasioned, as he says, by the sight of her picture, speaks of Charles at the Gallic Court thus :

There public care with private passion fought

A doubtful combat in his noble thought.

Charles was very much in the same condition with Erminia, whom Fairfax, the translator of Tasso, represents as longing to cure her wounded knight, and yet half hindered by womanly pudency. This probably is the meaning of the term "honour" in Fairfax's lines :—

For in the secret of her troubled thought
A doubtful combat love and honour fought.

When somebody had said that Sacharissa painted herself, a feminine procedure seldom unfashionable, Waller, who was, or, to keep his muse in exercise, affected to be in love with her, allowed the observation to be true in that sense only in which

Lavish nature with her best attire
Paints the gay spring.

Clarion, the first of all the race of silver-winged flies which possess the