Several passages from different writers having been mentioned in your
columns as likely to have suggested to our brilliant essayist and historian
his celebrated graphic sketch of the New Zealander meditating over the
ruins of London, I would beg leave to hint the probability that not one of
those many passages were present to his mind or memory at the moment he
wrote. The fact is that the picture is so true to nature, and has been so
often sketched, and the associations and reflections arising from it so
often felt and described, that I cannot for a moment admit the insinuation
of a charge of plagiarism, or even unconscious adaptation of another's
thoughts in one so abundantly stored with imagery of his own, that the very
overflowings of his own wealth would enrich a generation of writers. It has
however occurred to me that his classic mind might have remembered the
picture of Marius amid the ruins of Carthage, or, more probably, the still
more striking passage in the celebrated letter of Sulpicius to Cicero, on
the death of his daughter Tullia, in which he describes himself, on his
return from Asia, as sailing from AEgina towards Megara, and contemplating
the surrounding countries:
"Behind me lay AEgina, before me Megara; on my right I saw Piraeus, and
on my left Corinth. These cities, once so flourishing and magnificent,
now presented nothing to my view but a sad spectacle of desolation."
And he then proceeds with his melancholy reflections on so many perishing
memorials of human glory and grandeur in so small a compass.