APPROPRIATION OF A THOUGHT—OLDHAM, DRYDEN, AND BYRON.—THE STATE OF MIND IN THE PROGRESS OF COMPOSITION.
"How when the Fancy, lab'ring for a birth,
With unfelt Throws brings its rude issue forth:
How after, when imperfect, shapeless thought
Is by the judgment into Fashion wrought,
When at first search I traverse o'er my mind,
Nought but a dark and empty void I find:
Some little hints at length like sparks break thence,
And glimmering thoughts just dawning into sense:
Confus'd awhile the mixt ideas lie,
With nought of mark to be discover'd by,
Like colours undistinguish'd in the night,
Till the dusk images, moved to the light,
Teach the discerning Faculty to choose
Which it had best adopt and which refuse."
"Some New Pieces" in Oldham's Works, pp. 126-27., 1684.
Dryden, alluding to his work:
"When it was only a confused mass of thoughts tumbling over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and there either to be chosen or rejected by the judgment."—Dedication to the Rival Ladies.
Lord Byron's appropriation of the same idea:
——"As yet 'tis but a chaos
Of darkly brooding thoughts: my fancy is
In her first work, more nearly to the light
Holding the sleeping images of things
For the selection of the pausing judgment."
Doge of Venice.
Had Oldham or Dryden the prior claim to the thought? Byron derived his plagiarism from D'Israeli, "On the Literary Character" (vol. i. p. 284., 1828), where Dryden's Dedication to his Rival Ladies is quoted, and not from the Dedication itself, as the Retrospective Review imagined (vol. vii. p. 158.), "by levying contributions in the most secret and lonely recesses of our literature."
JAMES CORNISH.