Perhaps then we shall find undoubted marks of Imitation, both in the Sentiment, and Expression of great writers.
To begin with such considerations as are most GENERAL.
I. An identity of the subject-matter of poetry is no sure evidence of Imitation: and least of all, perhaps, in natural description. Yet where the local peculiarities of nature are to be described, there an exact conformity of the matter will evince an imitation.
Descriptive poets have ever been fond of lavishing all the riches of their fancy on the Spring. But the appearances of this prime of the year are so diversified with the climate, that descriptions of it, if taken directly from nature, must needs be very different. The Greek and Latin, and, since them, the Provencial poets, when they insist, as they always do, on the indulgent softness of this season, its genial dews and fostering breezes, speak nothing but what is agreeable to their own experience and feeling.
It ver; et Venus; et Veneris praenuntius antè
Pinnatus graditur Zephyrus vestigia propter:
Flora quibus mater praespergens antè viaï
Cuncta coloribus egregiis et odoribus opplet.
Venus, or the spirit of love, is represented by those poets as brooding o’er this delicious season;
Rura foecundat voluptas: rura Venerem sentiunt.
Ipsa gemmas purpurantem pingit annum floribus:
Ipsa surgentis papillas de Favonî spiritu
Urguet in toros tepentes; ipsa roris lucidi, &c.
and a great deal more to the same purpose, which every one recollects in the old classic and in the Provencial poets.
But when we hear this language from the more Northern, and particularly our English bards, who perhaps are shivering with the blasts of the North-east, at the very time their imagination would warm itself with these notions, one is certain this cannot be the effect of observation, but of a sportful fancy; enchanted by the native loveliness of these exotic images, and charmed by the secret insensible power of imitation.
And to shew the certainty of this conclusion, Shakespear, we may observe, who had none of this classical or Provencial bias on his mind, always describes, not a Greek, or Italian, or Provencial, but an English Spring; where we meet with many unamiable characters; and, among the rest, instead of Zephyr or Favonius, we have the bleak North-east, that nips the blooming infants of the Spring.