This remarkable saying is often quoted, but Newton was anticipated

Incessantly, and to his reading brings not

A spirit and judgment equal or superior,

(And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains ;

Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys

And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.'

Paradise Regained, Book IV.

But even Milton is not the only other great writer who employed the striking simile of "gathering pebbles." The following passage occurs in the essay "On Useful Studies," from the works of Jeremy Taylor :

"Spend not your time in that which profits not; for your labour and your health, your time and your studies, are very valuable; and it is a thousand pities to see a diligent and hopeful person spend himself in gathering cockle shells and little pebbles, in telling sands upon the shores, and making garlands of useless daisies."

THE CLAIMS OF DESCENT.

The witty Earl of Rochester has, in a poetical "Epistle from Artemesia in Town to Chloe in the Country," the following lines, which have long been "popular quotations":

"The heir and hope of a great family,

Which with strong beer and beef the country rules,

And ever since the Conquest have been fools."

Both Pope and Savage have imitated this passage, the former, however, with little elegance :

Go, if your ancient but ignoble blood

Have crept through scoundrels ever since the flood.-Pope.

Savage speaks of himself as

No tenth transmitter of a foolish face.

HONOUR.

Hotspur's speech on honour, in Shakspeare's Henry IV., Part I.,

stock" quotation :—

"By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap

To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon ;
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,

Where fathom line could never touch the ground

And pluck up drownèd honour by the locks;
So he, that doth redeem her thence, might wear
Without co-rival all her dignities."

This speech finds a curious parallel in a tragedy of the Greek poet Euripides, where the usurping Theban king, Eteocles, exclaims :

"For honour I would mount above the stars,
Above the sun's high course, or sink beneath
Earth's deepest centre, might I so obtain
This idol of my soul, this worshipt power
Of regal state; and to another never
Would I resign her, but myself engross
The splendid honour. It were base indeed
To barter for low rank a kingly crown;

And shame it were that he who comes in arms,
Spreading o'er this brave realm the waste of war,
Should his rude will enjoy. All Thebes would blush
At my dishonour, did I, craven-like,

Shrink from the Argive spear, and to his hand
Resign my rightful sceptre."

THE SANGUINE FLOWER.

Drummond, of Hawthornden, has the following in his "Epitaph on Prince Henry":

"Sad violet, and that sweet flower that bears
In sanguine spots the tenor of our woes ;"

which Milton has thus imitated in his “Lycidas”:—
"Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge
Like to that sanguine flower inscribed by woe."

PEDANTRY.

An instance of imitation in prose composition is to be found in an essay in the Mirror, by Henry Mackenzie, in which he can hardly be said to have merely imitated the style of Addison, but to have borrowed both sentiment and language. In an excellent essay in the Spectator, Addison has the following passage :

"A man who has been brought up among books, and is able to talk of nothing else, is a very indifferent companion, and what we call a pedant. But, methinks, we should enlarge the title, and give it to every one that does not know how to think out of his profession and particular way of life."

Observe how very closely his imitator, Mackenzie, follows the above :

"Pedantry, in the common sense of the word, means an absurd ostentation of learning, and stiffness of phraseology, proceeding from a misguided knowledge of books, and a total ignorance of men. But I

have often thought, that we might extend its signification a good deal further, and, in general, apply it to that failing which disposes a person to obtrude upon others subjects of conversation relating to his own business, studies, or amusement."

Here Mackenzie has said the same thing as Addison, with this difference: Addison has expressed himself in fifty-seven words, which his imitator amplifies into seventy-three, and without any advantage to the sense. Mackenzie was a deliberate imitator of the charming literary style of Addison, and the two periodicals conducted by Mackenzie (Mirror and Lounger), published in Edinburgh during the latter part of last century, were avowedly formed on the model of the Spectator; but surely, in the case above cited, the author of the "Man of Feeling" has gone considerably beyond mere imitation of style.

፡፡ SWEETNESS ON THE DESERT AIR."

Disraeli, in his "Curiosities of Literature," says the following celebrated stanza in "Gray's Elegy" seems partly to be borrowed :— "Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

Pope had said,-" Rape of the Lock," Canto. IV. :—

"There kept my charms concealed from mortal eye,
Like roses that in deserts bloom and die."

Young says of Nature, "Love of Fame," Satire 5 :—
“In distant wilds, by human eye unseen,

She rears her flowers and spreads her velvet green;
Pure gurgling rills the lonely deserts trace,
And waste their music on a savage race."

And Shenstone has, Elegy IV. :—

"And like the desert's lily, bloom to fade."

BUBBLES.

The writer of a paper in Fraser's Magazine, some years ago, entitled, "The Plagiarisms of Thomas Moore," sets down every resemblance between that poet and his predecessors and contemporaries as a direct theft. He occasionally finds, however, that from the number of writers who have used the same illustration, it is often difficult to say which was the model that the Irish bard had followed; and to justify his attack on Moore, he is necessitated to charge upon each writer the crime of pilfering from the other. For example, in the following

:

See how, beneath the moonbeam's smile,
Yon little billow heaves its breast,

And foams and sparkles for awhile,

And, murmuring, then subsides to rest!
Thus man, the sport of bliss and care,
Rises on Time's eventful sea,

And having swelled a moment there,
Then melts into eternity.-Moore.
On the vast ocean of his wonders here,
We, momentary bubbles, ride;

Till, crushed by the tempestuous tide,
Sunk in the parent flood, we disappear.-Fenton.
All forms that perish other forms supply;
By turns we catch the vital breath, and die;

Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne,

They rise, they break, and to that sea return.-Pope.

A smoke, a flower, a shadow, and a breath,

Are real things compared with life and death.

Like bubbles on the sea of life we pass,

Swell, burst, and mingle with the common mass.—S. Boyse.

Here the idea is the same, and the expression often identical; yet it does not follow that one writer imitated another. The comparison of time to the ocean, and of human life to the bubbles which are raised by the surge, is surely not of so hidden a character as to preclude more than one person from having suggested it.

TRACKLESS OCEAN.

In Byron's well-known apostrophe to the ocean in "Childe Harold," the line,

"Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow,"

finds a parallelism in Barry Cornwall's (Bryan Waller Proctor) "Address to the Ocean," in the following

"Thou trackless and immeasurable main !

On thee no record ever lived again

To meet the hand that writ it."

THE TALISMAN.

Sir William Jones, in his preface to the Persian Grammar, says of perfection, that "it seems to withdraw itself from the pursuit of mortals in proportion to their endeavours of attaining it, like the talisman in the Arabian Tales, which a bird carried from tree to tree, as often as its pursuer approached." Observe the style in which Moore throws into verse this Eastern allusion:

'Has Hope, like the bird in the story,
That flitted from tree to tree,
With the talisman's glittering glory,—
Has Hope been that bird to thee?

On branch after branch alighting,
The gem she did still display,
And when nearest and most inviting,
Then waft the fair gem away."

BEAUTY AND FLOWERS.

In the following examples, one is at a loss to say which poet has stated the thought most beautifully :—

Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,

Nor praise the deep vermilion of the rose ;

They were but sweet, sweet figures of delight,

Drawn after thee, thou pattern of all those.-Shakspeare.

If any ask why roses please the sight?

Because their leaves upon thy cheek do glow.

If any ask why lilies are so white?

Because their blossoms in thy mind do glow.-G. Fletcher.

Why does azure deck the sky?

'Tis to be like thine eyes of blue.

Why is red the rose's dye?

Because it is thy blushes' hue.

All that's fair, by Love's decree,

Has been made resembling thee.-Moore.

THE MEASURE OF HAPPINESS.

Sperone Speroni, when Francis Maria II., Duke of Rovere, proposed the question: Which was preferable, the republic or the principality; the perfect and the not durable, or the less perfect and not so liable to change,-replied that 'Our happiness is to be measured by its quality, not by its duration, and that he preferred to live for one day like a man, than for a hundred years like a brute, a stock, or a stone.' This same sentiment has been thus finely condensed by Addison, in his "Cato" :

"A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty,

Is worth a whole eternity of bondage."

In language still more glowing and eloquent, has Heber embodied the same idea:

"Swell, swell the bugle; sound the fife;

To all the sensual world proclaim

One crowded hour of glorious life

Is worth an age without a name."

RUDDY DROPS.

Gray has a well-known line :

"Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart,"