Dry summer’s dust, in fearful whisp’rings stirr’d,
As loth to waken any singing bird.’
Poetical beauties of this sort are scattered, not sparingly, over the green lap of nature through almost every page of our author’s writings. His description of the squirrel hunted by mischievous boys, of the flowers stuck in the windows like the hues of the rainbow, and innumerable others might be quoted.
His Philarete (the fourth song of the Shepherd’s Pipe) has been said to be the origin of Lycidas: but there is no resemblance, except that both are pastoral elegies for the loss of a friend. The Inner Temple Mask has also been made the foundation of Comus, with as little reason. But so it is: if an author is once detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of plagiarism ever after: and every writer that finds an ingenious or partial editor, will be made to set up his claim of originality against him. A more serious charge of this kind has been urged against the principal character in Paradise Lost (that of Satan), which is said to have been taken from Marino, an Italian poet. Of this, we may be able to form some judgment, by a comparison with Crashaw’s translation of Marino’s Sospetto d’Herode. The description of Satan alluded to, is given in the following stanzas:
‘Below the bottom of the great abyss,
There where one centre reconciles all things,
The world’s profound heart pants; there placed is
Mischief’s old master; close about him clings
A curl’d knot of embracing snakes, that kiss
His correspondent cheeks; these loathsome strings