"Such is the tombs the Noble Essex gave
Great Spenser's learned reliques, such his grave:
Howe'er ill-treated in his life he were,
His sacred bones rest honourably here."
How are these two epitaphs, with their differing dates, to be reconciled? Can he have been born in 1510, as the first one says "obiit immaturâ morte?" Now eighty-five is not very immature; and I believe he entered at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1569, at which time he would be fifty-nine, and that at a period when college education commenced at an earlier age than now. Vertue's portrait, engraved 1727, takes as a motto the last two lines of the first epitaph—"Anglica te vivo," &c.
E.N.W
Southwark, April 29 1850.
BORROWED THOUGHTS.
Crenius wrote a dissertation De Furibus Librariis, and J. Conrad Schwarz another De Plagio Literario, in which some curious appropriations are pointed out; your pages have already contained some additional recent instances. The writers thus pillaged might exclaim, "Pereant iste qui post nos nostra dixerunt." Two or three instances have occurred to me which, I think, have not been noticed. Goldsmith's Madame Blaize is known to be a free version of La fameuse La Galisse. His well-known epigram,—