on the hill he was in the hollow;" or another about a princess, (for he had all kinds of high personages at command,) who was confined in some dismal place all full of sarpints and toads and vifers1. Johnny, too, had a story answering to the Robber-bridegroom in MM. Grimm's collection, in which the lady at the bridal banquet told, as if relating a dream, all that she had seen when she secretly entered the robbers' den, and as she proceeded in her narrative, the disguised robber would get up and say, "Dreams are but feebles, and feebles are but lies; He also knew the Frog-king 2, and several others in the same collection; and he had tales of fairies without end. Poor Johnny! he grew up, got married, died young (no uncommon fate with the Irish peasant), and lies buried at the ruined church of Tipper; a place to which, in my serious moods, I was wont to repair, to meditate among the graves, not tombs, for tombs there were none. These little details-into which I have ventured to enter, chiefly, I must own, to indulge in the pleasure which I feel in calling back the happy 1 Animals nearly as unknown to the Irish peasant as kangaroos and opossums. 2 This story was also related to me by a woman from Somersetshire. Dr. Leyden heard it in Scotland. My Somerset friend concluded it by saying, “and I came away." She could not tell why; but it is, I should suppose, a formula signifying that the narrator knows nothing further. days of childhood,-will, I know, expose me to the scorn of many, doubtless very sage and very sagacious personages; but there are others (and they are those whose approbation I most covet,) by whom they will, I am confident, be received with indulgence, if not with favour. Begging pardon, therefore, for my digression, I now proceed with my subject. A great coincidence of thought and expression is often to be observed between writers of the same age and country, or of different ages and different countries; and yet there may have been no imitation whatever. We are, in fact, too apt to make charges of plagiarism. For my part, I am slow to make the charge myself, or to admit it when made by others. It must, to convince me, be quite certain that the author had read the work from which he is accused of having borrowed, and that the number of similar ideas and expressions should be so great as to leave no room for doubt2. 1 I have myself been charged with taking the simile of a map of the world, in the Preface to my Outlines of History, from the work of a similar title in the Library of Useful Knowledge; whereas the truth is, I doubt if I have ever seen that work. 2 "There is a pleasure sure in being mad Which none but madmen know." Dryden's Spanish Friar. "There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which none but poets know."-Cowper's Task. Though I think there is imitation here, I would not positively assert it. Thus no one can hesitate to believe that Lord Byron took the admired description of a shipwreck in his Don Juan from a narrative which was published a short time before at Edinburgh, though his lordship kindly left to the critics or to posterity the pleasure of making the discovery. It has never entered the mind of any one to doubt that Spenser was largely indebted to Tasso for his Bower of Acrasia, or that Virgil frequently did no more than translate Homer. The simile of the reflection of the sunbeams from the water, in the Eneis, has surely been taken from the Argonautics of that sweet poet Apollonius of Rhodes; and Ariosto and Camoens 2 have as surely been indebted to Virgil for the use of the same comparison, though the latter poet has altered, in my opinion much improved it, by substituting a mirror in the hand of a boy for the original pot of water. On the other hand, (to give a single and a slight instance,) when Horace says that the Julian star (the young Marcellus) shines among others like the moon among the lesser fires; and when Bojardo, in one of his most pleasing stanzas, says that all other beauties were to Angelica as the other stars to the moon, or the moon to the sun*, 4 micat inter omnes Julium sidus, velut inter ignes Luna minores." "Tal sarebbon con lei qual esser suole L'altre stelle a Diana e lei co 'l sole." Orl. Innam., I. c. iii. st. 69. I will -we might say that he had Horace in view; for the lord of Scandiano was well read in the classics. But when, in an Arabian tale, we meet, "Noored-deen, who shone among his companions like the moon among the inferior luminaries"1, we see at once that this is a mere coincidence; for what could the Arabian story-teller know of Horace ? These coincidences are much more frequent than people in general seem to suppose. give an instance which occurred to myself. Having occasion, in the Fairy Mythology, to relate an Irish legend in the character of an old woman, I said, speaking of a field of wheat at sunset, "and it was a pretty sight to see it waving so beautifully with every air of wind that was going over it, dancing like to the music of a thrush that was singing down below in the hedge." It was not without surprise that some time after I read, in the Rosenöl of Jos. von Haminer, the following passage from an Arabian author :"The sun was just setting, and the glow of rubies was penetrating the emeraldine enamel of the trees, whose boughs were waving to the sound of the melody of the birds 2." Though the language and colouring are widely different, the idea, it will be seen, is precisely the same. Here I will observe, for the benefit of writers of fiction, that minds operate in so similar a manner, that one 1 Noor-ed-deen signifies light of religion': hence the simile readily presented itself. 2 Fairy Mythology, ii. p. 184. Rosenöl, ii. p. 45. may venture, without fear of violating nature, to give very poetic and even very philosophic ideas to characters taken from any rank in society, provided the language in which they are clothed be such as these persons are in the habit of employing. An instance may serve to illustrate this as sertion. Coleridge, in a most beautiful poem, when deriding the error of those who call the note of the nightingale melancholy', exclaims, "A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy : But some night-wandering man, whose soul was pierc'd Or slow distemper, or neglected love, (And so, poor wretch! fill'd all things with himself, And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale Of his own sorrow,) he, and such as he, 1 The earliest instance, perhaps the source, of this error is the passage of the Odyssey, xix. 518 et seq. 2 See Petrarca, son. 270. In Die Nacht' of Göthe occurs the following stanza, which contains the whole philosophy of the matter: "Wenn die Nachtigall Geliebten "When the nightingale to lovers That to captives and th' afflicted Had Coleridge read this before he wrote the lines above? |