Shall burning Ætna, if a sage requires,
Forget to thunder and recall its fires?
On air or sea new motions be impress’d,
Oh blameless Bethel! to relieve thy breast?
When the loose mountain trembles from on high,
Shall gravitation cease if you go by?
Or some old temple nodding to its fall
For Chartres’ head reserve the hanging wall?
Essay IV. V. 123.

Now turn to Mr. Wollaston, an easy natural writer (where his natural manner is not stiffened by a mathematical pedantry) and abounding in fine sallies of the imagination; and see if the poet did not catch his expression, as well as the fire of his conception in this place, from the philosopher:

“As to the course of Nature, if a good man be passing by an infirm building, just in the article of falling, can it be expected that God should suspend the force of gravitation till he is gone by, in order to his deliverance; or can we think it would be increased, and the fall hastened, if a bad man was there, only that he might be caught, crushed, and made an example? If a man’s safety or prosperity should depend upon winds or rains, must new motions be impressed upon the atmosphere, and new directions given to the floating parts of it, by some extraordinary and new influence from God?”

III. Sometimes the original expression is not taken but paraphrased; and the writer disguises himself in a kind of circumlocution. Yet this artifice does not conceal him, especially if some fragments, as it were, of the inventor’s phrase are found dispersedly in the imitation.

For in the secret of her troubled thought
A doubtful combat love and honour fought.
Fairfax’s Tasso, B. IV. S. 70.

Hence Mr. Waller,

There public care and private passion fought
A doubtful combat in his noble thought.
Poems, p. 14.

Public care is the periphrasis of honour, and private passion, of love. For the rest you see—disjecti membra poetæ.

IV. An imitation is discoverable, when there is but the least particle of the original expression, “by a peculiar and no very natural arrangement of words.”

In Fletcher’s faithful Shepherdess, the speaker says,