GRAY'S PLAGIARISMS.
Your correspondent VARRO (Vol. iii., p. 206.) rejects as a plagiarism in Gray the instance quoted by me from a note in Byron (Vol. iii., p. 35.), on the ground that Gray has himself expressly stated that the passage was "an imitation" of the one in Dante. I always thought that in literature, as in other things, some thefts were acknowledged and others unacknowledged, and that the only difference between them was, that, while the acknowledgment went to extenuate the offence, it the more completely established the fact of the appropriation. A great many actual borrowings, but for such acknowledgment, might pass for coincidences. "On peut se rencontrer," as the Chevalier Ramsay said on a similar occasion.
The object, however, of this Note is not to shake VARRO'S belief in the impeccability of Gray, for whose genius I entertain the highest admiration and respect, but to show your readers that the imputation of plagiarism against that poet is not wholly unfounded. First, we have the well-known line in his poem of The Bard,—
"Give ample room and verge enough,"—
which is shown to have been appropriated from the following passage in Dryden's tragedy of Don Sebastian:
"Let fortune empty her whole quiver on me;
I have a soul that, like an ample shield,
Can take in all, and verge enough for more."
To this I shall add the famous apothegm at the close of the following stanzas, in his Ode On a Prospect of Eton College:
"Yet, ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies;
... ... Where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise."
The same thought is expressed by Sir W. Davenant in the lines:
"Then ask not bodies doom'd to die
To what abode they go:
Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy,
'Tis better not to know."
But the source of Gray's apothegm is still more obviously traceable to these lines in Prior:
"Seeing aright we see our woes;
Then what avails us to have eyes?
From ignorance our comfort flows,
The only wretched are the wise."
A third sample in Gray is borrowed from Milton. The latter, in speaking of the Deity, has this beautiful image:
"Dark with excessive light thy skirts appear."
And Gray, with true poetic feeling, has applied this image to Milton himself in those forceful lines in the Progress of Poesy, in which he alludes to the poet's blindness:
"The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
He saw; but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night."
There is a passage in Longinus which appears to me to have furnished Milton with the germ of this thought. The Greek rhetorician is commenting on the use of figurative language, and, after illustrating his views by a quotation from Demosthenes, he adds: "In what has the orator here concealed the figure? plainly in its own lustre." In this passage Longinus elucidates one figure by another,—a not unusual practice with that elegant writer.
HENRY H. BREEN.
St. Lucia, April, 1851.