O! what is it proud slime will not believe
Of his own worth, to hear it equal prais’d
Thus with the Gods—
A. 1.
from Juvenal’s
— — —nihil est quod credere de se
Non possit, cum laudatur Diis æqua potestas.
IX. Conclude the same when the expression is antique, in the writer’s own language.
In Mr. Waller’s Panegyric on the Protector,
So, when a Lion shakes his dreadful mane,
And angry grows, if he that first took pain
To tame his youth, approach the haughty beast,
He bends to him, but frights away the rest.
The antique formality of the phrase that first took pain, for, that first took the pains, in so pure and modern a speaker, as this poet, looks suspicious. He took it, as he found it in an older writer. There are many other marks of imitation, but we had needed no more than this to make the discovery:
So when a lion shakes his dreadful mane,
And beats his tail, with courage proud, and wroth,
If his commander come, who first took pain
To tame his youth, his lofty crest down go’th.
Fairfax’s Tasso, B. VIII. S. 83.
X. You observe in most of the instances, here given, besides other marks, there is an identity of rhyme. And this circumstance of itself, in our poetry, is no bad argument of imitation, particularly when joined to a similarity of expression. And the reason is, the rhyme itself very naturally brings the expression along with it.
1. “Stuck o’er with titles, and hung round with strings,
That thou mayst be by Kings, or whores of Kings.”
Essay on Man, E. IV. V. 205.