As the character is amiable, you will be pleased to hear me own, there are many modern poets to whom it belongs. Perhaps, the first that occurred to my thoughts was Mr. Addison. But the observation holds of others, and of one, in particular, very much his superior in true genius. I know not whether you agree with me, that the famous line in the Essay on Man;
“An honest man’s the noblest work of God,”
is taken from Plato’s, Πάντων ἱερώτατόν ἐστιν ἄνθρωπος ὁ ἀγαθός. But I am sure you will that the still more famous lines, which shallow men repeat without understanding,
“For modes of Faith let graceless zealots fight,
His, can’t be wrong whose life is in the right:”
are but copied, though with vast improvement in the force and turn of expression, from the excellent and, let it be no disparagement to him to say, from the orthodox Mr. Cowley. The poet is speaking of his friend Crashaw.
“His Faith perhaps in some nice tenets might
Be wrong; his life, I’m sure, was in the right.”
Mr. Pope, who found himself in the same circumstances with Crashaw, and had suffered no doubt from the like uncharitable constructions of graceless zeal, was very naturally tempted to adopt this candid sentiment, and to give it the further heightening of his own spirited expression.
Let us see then how far we are got in this inquiry. We may say of the old Latin poets, that they all came out of the Greek schools. It is as true of the moderns in this part of the world, that they, in general, have had their breeding in both the Greek and Latin. But when the question is of any particular writer, how far and in what instances you may presume on his being a professed imitator, much will depend on the certain knowledge you have of his Age, Education, and Character. When all these circumstances meet in one man, as they have done in others, but in none perhaps so eminently as in B. Jonson, wherever you find an acknowledged likeness, you will do him no injustice to call it imitation.
Yet all this, you say, comes very much short of what you require of me. You want me to specify those peculiar considerations, and even to reduce them into rule, from which one may be authorised, in any instance to pronounce of imitations. It is not enough, you pretend, to say of any passage in a celebrated poet, that it most probably was taken from some other. In your extreme jealousy for the credit of your order, you call upon me to shew the distinct marks which convict him of this commerce.
In a word, You require me to turn to the poets; to gather a number of those passages I call Imitations; and to point to the circumstances in each that prove them to be so. I attend you with pleasure in this amusing search. It is not material, I suppose, that we observe any strict method in our ramblings. And yet we will not wholly neglect it.