Your correspondent VARRO (Vol. iii., p. 206.) rejects as a plagiarism in
Gray the instance quoted by me from a note in Byron (Vol. iii., p. 35.),
on the ground that Gray has himself expressly stated that the passage
was "_an imitation_" of the one in Dante. I always thought that in
literature, as in other things, some thefts were acknowledged and others
unacknowledged, and that the only difference between them was, that,
while the acknowledgment went to extenuate the offence, it the more
completely established the fact of the appropriation. A great many
actual borrowings, but for such acknowledgment, might pass for
coincidences. "On peut se rencontrer," as the Chevalier Ramsay said on a
similar occasion.
The object, however, of this Note is not to shake VARRO'S belief in the
impeccability of Gray, for whose genius I entertain the highest
admiration and respect, but to show your readers that the imputation of
plagiarism against that poet is not wholly unfounded. First, we have the
well-known line in his poem of _The Bard_,--
"Give ample room and verge enough,"--
which is shown to have been appropriated from the following passage in
Dryden's tragedy of _Don Sebastian_:
"Let fortune empty her whole quiver on me;
I have a soul that, like an _ample_ shield,
Can take in all, and _verge enough_ for more."
To this I shall add the famous apothegm at the close of the following
stanzas, in his Ode _On a Prospect of Eton College_:
"Yet, ah! why should they _know_ their fate,
Since _sorrow_ never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies;
... ... _Where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise_."
The same thought is expressed by Sir W. Davenant in the lines:
"Then ask not bodies doom'd to die
To what abode they go:
Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy,
'Tis better not to know."
But the source of Gray's apothegm is still more obviously traceable to
these lines in Prior:
"Seeing aright we see our woes;
Then what avails us to have eyes?
_From ignorance our comfort flows,
The only wretched are the wise._"
A third sample in Gray is borrowed from Milton. The latter, in speaking
of the Deity, has this beautiful image:
"_Dark with excessive light_ thy skirts appear."
And Gray, with true poetic feeling, has applied this image to Milton
himself in those forceful lines in the _Progress of Poesy_, in which he
alludes to the poet's blindness:
"The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
He saw; but, _blasted with excess of light_,
Closed his eyes in endless night."
There is a passage in Longinus which appears to me to have furnished
Milton with the germ of this thought. The Greek rhetorician is
commenting on the use of figurative language, and, after illustrating
his views by a quotation from Demosthenes, he adds: "In what has the
orator here _concealed_ the figure? plainly _in its own lustre_." In
this passage Longinus elucidates one figure by another,--a not unusual
practice with that elegant writer.