In her first work, more nearly to the light
Holding the sleeping images of things
For the selection of the pausing judgment."
Doge of Venice.
Had Oldham or Dryden the prior claim to the thought? Byron derived his plagiarism from D'Israeli, "On the Literary Character" (vol. i. p. 284., 1828), where Dryden's Dedication to his Rival Ladies is quoted, and not from the Dedication itself, as the Retrospective Review imagined (vol. vii. p. 158.), "by levying contributions in the most secret and lonely recesses of our literature."
JAMES CORNISH.
THE "EISELL" CONTROVERSY.
When Polonius proposed to use the players according to their desert, Hamlet rebuked him with "Much better man! use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity!" I do not think it necessary to notice that what is merely coarse and vulgar in an unprovoked attack upon myself, feeling that I have no right to expect the man who has no consideration for his own dignity to think of mine. But when an attempt is made to sow dissension between me and those whose opinions I value, and whose characters I esteem, I feel that in justice to myself and in satisfaction to them, a few words are not out of place.
Some few of your readers may have seen a pamphlet in reply to MR. SINGER, on the meaning of eisell and from certain insinuations about "pegs and wires," and a "literary coterie," it might be supposed that there existed some other bond for the support of "NOTES AND QUERIES" than a common object affords. I wish then to inform such of them as may not happen to belong to the "coterie" in question (which I suppose exists somewhere—perhaps holds a sort of witch's-sabbath on some inaccessible peak in the pamphleteer's imagination), that I have never, to my knowledge, even seen either MR. SINGER or the editor of "NOTES AND QUERIES;" and that, so far from meaning offence to the angry gentleman who seems disposed to run-a-muck against all who come in his way, I actually supposed all meant in good part, and characterised his remarks as "pleasant criticism."
From an apparent inability, however, of this pamphleteer to distinguish between pleasantry and acrimony, he has attempted to fix on me offences against others when I have ventured to dissent from their conclusions. All I can say is, that I have never written anything inconsistent with the very high respect I feel for the abilities and the great services rendered by the gentlemen I have had occasion to allude to.