Olivia, asserts her superiority to the ordinary
laws of matter. The pleasing hyperbole will
not pass unchallenged. "Mine," says he of
Abbotsford, "tho' I will confess you have clad
my dainty lass in a becoming garb. It was I
who sang:

"E'en the slight harebell raised its head
Elastic from her airy tread."

But a big burly man, with scorbutic visage and
slovenly dress, and swearing the legiblest of
any man christen'd, takes the trembling idea
under his cloak: " Arcades ambo! The wench
is mine! Did ye never read, then, my Sad
Shepherdess, wherein I sang:

"Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blowball from its stalk?

Yea, and in my Vision of Delight, stands it
not fairly writ:

"... thence did Venus learn to lead
The Idalian bands, and so to tread
As if the wind, not she, did walk,
Nor prest a flower, nor bow'd a stalk"?

Almost simultaneously with Ben's claim, comes
the silver voice of him who sang the fall of
man and the conflict of the warrior angels, with
Sabrina's song:

Thus I set my printless feet
O'er the cowslip's velvet head,
That bends not as I tread.

"By the mass, then," exclaims another, one
Dabridgecourt Belchier, "ye are all wrong!
In my comedy of Hans Beer-pot, acted in the
Low Countries by an honest company of
health-drinkers, I wrote:

"With that she rose like nimble roe,
The tender grass scarce bending."

The clamour thickens, but a musical laugh
breaks in on the controversy, and a bland face
smiles upon the wordy storm. " Mine, I think,
my masters," says the Bard of Avon. " Ere
my muse was in her teens, in the first heir of
my invention, I wrote:

"The grass stoops not, she treads on it so light."

There is a momentary lull, but again the murmur
swells, fresh claimants springing up like
the warriors from Cadmean teeth.

It would be unfair to characterise these
coincidences as plagiarisms. As in the case of
the instance just cited, many thoughts have
passed into the stock-in-trade of versifiers,
and can as little claim an only parent as the
immemorial rhymes of love and dove. Oftentimes,
too, the same idea must have occurred
independently to different writers; and it is
rather matter of wonder, seeing how many
minds have been bent to illustrate man's inner
life—the passions by which his soul is swayed,
his fears, his longings, his unrest, his joys and
sorrows—that thoughts and images are so
seldom repeated. In many cases, however,
where such coincidences occur, and probably
in the majority, that which at first sight would
suggest the idea of plagiarism, is but an
unconscious echo. A book is taken up casually,
or a quotation is made in the hours of social
intercourse; the mind seizes upon it, stores it
for further reflection; it is for the time forgotten,
and when next it forces itself upon the
thoughts of the recipient is welcomed as the
indigenous growth of his own mind, and is
unhesitatingly employed, with as little recollection
of its origin as desire to appropriate another's
due.

Some of these minor coincidences are curious.
Here are a few, culled almost at random:

Few quotations are more hackneyed than a
line from Milton's Lycidas: a poem which, it
will be remembered, was written in 1637:

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind.)

Three years earlier, when Milton was a young
man of six-and-twenty, and had probably not
merged his love for the "well-trod stage" in
the fierce earnestness of the great struggle
that was then impending, there was licensed a
comedy by Philip Massinger, called A Very
Woman, where (Act V., Scene 4—Paulo, loq.)
occurs the noticeable parallelism, of which it
seems not improbable that Milton's line might
have been the echo:

Tho' the desire of fame be the last weakness
Wise men put off.

Another line, which, with myriads from the
same exhaustless store of wit and wisdom, has
passed into a current household word, has a
close parallel in Lord Bacon's Essays. Polonius,
in the precepts which he lays down for
the guidance of Laertes on the occasion of his
return to France, emphasises the crowning
injunction

... to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Bacon's Essays, which, as he himself tells us,
come home to men's business and bosoms, were
published six years earlier than the first sketch
of Hamlet. Shakespeare can scarcely be
supposed not to have read there (Essay xxiii.),
"Be so true to thyself that thou be not false
to others." To this sentence, surely, Bacon's
remark on the Essays generally, will apply:
"Tho' the piece be small, the silver is good."

In the case of a man like Gray, who wrote
so little, and who polished with such elaborate
care the little that he did produce, we should
not be disposed to seek for such a repetition of
familiar images as more prolific writers would
with difficulty avoid. The tiny volume, nevertheless,
which comprises the poetical works of
the author of the Elegy, will supply more than
one example. In The Bard, for instance,
occurs the line,

Dear as the ruddy drops which warm my heart:

which is scarcely altered from Julius Cæsar:

You are my true and honourable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.

The source from which Gray's line was
derived, if, indeed, it were derived at all,
precludes the notion of an intentional appropriation.
It has long been tolerably safe to purloin