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No writer can be fully convicted of imitation, except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied. Thus it can scarcely be doubted, that in the first of the following passages Pope remembered Ovid, and that in the second he copied Crashaw:

Saepe pater dixit, studium quid inutile tentas?
Maeonides nullas ipse reliquit opes–
Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,
Et quod conabar scribere, versus erat.
OVID.

Quit, quit this barren trade, my father cry’d:
Ev’n Homer left no riches when he dy’d–
In verse spontaneous flow’d my native strain,
Forc’d by no sweat or labour of the brain.
F. LEWIS.

I left no calling for this idle trade;
No duty broke, no father disobey’d;
While yet a child, ere yet a fool to fame,
I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.
POPE.

–This plain floor,
Believe me, reader, can say more
Than many a braver marble can,
Here lies a truly honest man.
CRASHAW.

This modest stone, what few vain marbles can,
May truly say, Here lies an honest man.
POPE.

Conceits, or thoughts not immediately impressed by sensible objects, or necessarily arising from the coalition or comparison of common sentiments, may be with great justice suspected whenever they are found a second time. Thus Wallar probably owed to Grotius an elegant compliment:

Here lies the learned Savil’s heir,
So early wise, and lasting fair,
That none, except her years they told,
Thought her a child, or thought her old.
WALLER.

[Transcriber’s note: Inconsistency in spelling Waller/Wallar in original]

Unica lux saecli, genitoris gloria, nemo
Quem puerum, nemo credidit esse senem.
GROT.

The age’s miracle, his father’s joy!
Nor old you would pronounce him, nor a boy.
F. LEWIS.

And Prior was indebted for a pretty illustration to Alleyne’s poetical history of Henry the Seventh:

For nought but light itself, itself can shew,
And only kings can write, what kings can do.
ALLEYNE.

Your musick’s pow’r, your musick must disclose,
For what light is, ’tis only light that shews.
PRIOR.

And with yet more certainty may the same writer be censured, for endeavouring the clandestine appropriation of a thought which he borrowed, surely without thinking himself disgraced, from an epigram of Plato:

[Greek: Tae Paphiae to katoptron, epei toiae men orasthai
Ouk ethelo, oiae d’ aen paros, ou dunamai.]

Venus, take my votive glass,
Since I am not what I was;
What from this day I shall be,
Venus, let me never see.

As not every instance of similitude can be considered as a proof of imitation, so not every imitation ought to be stigmatized as plagiarism. The adoption of a noble sentiment, or the insertion of a borrowed ornament, may sometimes display so much judgment as will almost compensate for invention: and an inferior genius may, without any imputation of servility, pursue the path of the ancients, provided he declines to tread in their footsteps.