No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure ’scape: back-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes.
Friar Lawrence, in Romeo and Juliet, observing the excessive raptures of Romeo on his marriage, gives way to a sentiment, naturally suggested by this circumstance:
These violent delights have violent ends,
And in their triumph die.
Now what is it, in prejudice to the originality of these places, to alledge a hundred or a thousand passages (for so many it were, perhaps, not impossible to accumulate) analogous to them in the ancient or modern poets? Could any reasonable critic mistake these genuine workings of the mind for instances of imitation?
In Cymbeline, the obsequies of Imogen are celebrated with a song of triumph over the evils of human life, from which death delivers us:
Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages, &c.
What a temptation this for the parallelist to shew his reading! yet his incomparable editor observes slightly upon it: “This is the topic of consolation, that nature dictates to all men on these occasions. The same farewell we have over the dead body in Lucian; ΤΕΚΝΟΝ ΑΘΛΙΟΝ, ΟΥΚΕΤΙ ΔΙΨΗΣΕΙΣ, ΟΥΚΕΤΙ ΠΕΙΝΗΣΕΙΣ, &c.”
When Valentine in the Twelfth-night reports the inconquerable grief of Olivia for the loss of a brother, the duke observes upon it,
O! she that hath a heart of that fine frame
To pay this debt of love but to a brother,
How will she love, when the rich golden shaft
Hath killed the flock of all affections else
That live in her?
’Tis strange, the critics have never accused the poet of stealing this sentiment from Terence, who makes Simo in the Andrian reason on his son’s concern for Chrysis in the same manner: