What is here said of the situation of the speakers reminds me of another class of expressions, which will often be similar in all poets. Nature, under the same conjunctures, gives birth to the same conceptions; and if they be of such a kind, as to exclude all thought of artifice, and the tricks of eloquence (as on occasions of deep anxiety and distress) they run, of themselves, into the same form of expression. The wretched Priam, in his lamentation of Hector, lets drop the following words:
οὗ μ’ ἄχος ὀξὺ κατοίσεται ἄïδος εἴσω:
“This line, says his translator, is particularly tender, and almost, word for word, the same with that of the Patriarch Jacob; who, upon a like occasion, breaks out in the same complaint, and tells his children, that, if they deprive him of his son Benjamin, they will bring down his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.”
We may, further, except, under this head, certain privileged forms of speech, which the peculiar idioms of different languages make necessary in them, and which poetry consecrates in all. But this is easily observed, and its effect is not very considerable.
2. In pleading this identity of expression, regard must be had to the language, from which the theft is supposed to be made. If from the same language (setting aside the exceptions, just mentioned) the same arrangement of the same words is admitted as a certain argument of plagiarism: nay, less than this will do in some instances, as where the imitated expression is pretty singular, or so remarkable, on any account, as to be well known, &c. But if from another language, the matter is not so easy. It can rarely happen, indeed, but by design, that there should be the same order or composition of words, in two languages. But that which passes even for literal translation, is but a similar composition of corresponding words. And what does this imply, but that the writers conceived of their object in the same manner, and had occasion to set it in the same light? An occasion, which is perpetually recurring to all authors. As may be gathered from that frequent and strong resemblance in the expression of moral sentiments, observable in the writers of every age and country. Can there be a commoner reflexion, or which more constantly occurs to the mind under the same appearance, than that of our great poet, who, speaking of the state after death, calls it
That undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns.
Shall we call this a translation of the Latin poet;
Nunc it per iter tenebricosum
Illuc, unde negant redire quenquam.
Catul. III. v. 11.
Or, doth it amount to any more than this, that the terms employed by the two writers in expressing the same obvious thought are correspondent? But correspondency and identity are different things. The latter is only, where the words are numerically the same, which can only happen in one and the same language: the other is effected by different sets of words, which are numerous in every language, and are therefore no convincing proof (abstractedly from other circumstances) of imitation.
From these general reflexions on language, without refining too far, or prying too curiously into the mysteries of it, the same conclusion meets us, as before. The expression of two writers may be similar, and sometimes even identical, and yet be original in both. Which shews the necessity there was to lead the reader through this long investigation of the general sources of similitude in works of INVENTION, in order to put him into a condition of judging truly and equitably of those of IMITATION. For if similarity, even in this province of words, which the reason of the thing shews to be most free from the constraint of general rules, be no argument of theft in all cases; much less can it be pretended of the other subjects of this inquiry, which from the necessary uniformity of nature in all her appearances, and of common sense in its operations upon them, must give frequent and unavoidable occasion to such similarity. But then this is all I would insinuate.