I could furnish you with various notes on Gray, pointing out remarkable coincidences of sentiment and expression between himself and other writers; but I cannot allow Gray to be a plagiary, any more than I can allow Burns to be so designated, in the following instances:—
At the end of the poem called The Vision, we find—
"And like a passing thought she fled."
In Hesiod we have—
"ὁ δ' ἔπτατο ὥστε νόημα."—Scut. Herc. 222.
Again, few persons are unacquainted with Burns's lines—
"Her 'prentice han' she tried on man,
An' then she made," &c.
In an old play, Cupid's Whirligig (4to. 1607), we read—
"Man was made when Nature was but an apprentice, but woman when she was a skilful mistress of her art."