A ROOM IN AN INN.

189

But the lines, "Alone in an Inn at Southampton, April 25, 1737," furnish the most favourable evidence of his talents :

The watch numbering the hours of his wife's sickness, and the glass that no longer retained her image, seem to me circumstances of affectionate grief most touchingly conceived.

The more we read, the more the original stock of thought dwindles. The famous description, in the Essay on Criticism, of the intermediate heights of literature ascending before the eyes of the climbing pilgrim, which Johnson praised as the most apt,

sublime, and proper simile in the English language, has been shown by Warton to be copied, almost literally, from Drummond. The outline having been traced over the glass of memory, the artist laid on the colouring.

Pope sought for pearls in some of the prose writers of the seventeenth century, who, in his day, were known to few scholars, and scarcely read by any. In them he found many of those brilliant sayings and axioms of moral wisdom, which, polished by taste and sharpened by skill, present such glittering points in his verse. The ingenious designation of one year

a reservoir to keep and spare:
The next a fountain spouting through his heir,

has been traced to the Church History of Fuller. The same witty and eloquent writer asks, with reference to the contemptuous neglect with which false and scandalous rumours should be regarded, "What madness were it to plant a piece of ordnance to beat down an aspen leaf!" Pope, in his satire upon Lord Hervey, has the vivacious and cutting interrogation—

Who breaks a butterfly upon the wheel?

Fuller says, that Monica, the mother of Augustine, "saw a glimpse of happiness through the chinks of her sickness-broken body;" Waller, describing the calmness of the mind when the storms of youth and manhood have subsided, introduces the same image into his celebrated lines :—

The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,

Lets in new light, through chinks which time has made.

TICKELL AND GOLDSMITH.

191

While speaking of these resemblances of thought, I may notice a curious coincidence between Dryden and Lord Bacon. Dryden says of a satirist

He makes his desperate passes with a smile.

Lord Bacon remarks of controversial writers upon subjects connected with the church-"To search and rip up rounds with a laughing countenance."

Of

Tickell wrote a poem on the death of Addison: popular and pleasing it is. Goldsmith called it the finest elegy in the language; Johnson indirectly preferred it to Milton's pastoral dirge. course, the two Doctors were equally wrong; I only mean to refer to the saying of Steele, that the poem is prose in rhyme. He was literally correct without knowing it. Read the famous couplet

He taught us how to live, and (oh! too high
The price for knowledge) taught us how to die;

and then turn to the fifth book of Hooker's Polity. He is treating of the prayer in the Litany against sudden death; and argues that the Christian ought to desire a dismissal like that of Moses, or Jacob, or Joshua, or David-a peaceful, leisurely termination of life, so as to comfort those whom he leaves behind, by filling their hearts with faith and hope; "and, to sum up all, to teach the world no less virtuously how to die, than they had done before how to live." Here is Tickell's golden rhyme in its native bed of prose. However, in poetry, as in nature, everything is double. If Tickell borrows, he also lends. His Ode on the Prospect of Peace, which obtained the warm praise of Addison, contains the outline of Goldsmith's lively portrait of the returning soldier :

COLOURS OF TREES AND GRASS.

193

AUGUST 6TH.

"Not

SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT said one day to Constable-" Do you not find it difficult to place your brown tree?" in the least," was the answer, "for I never put such a thing in a picture!" On another occasion, the accomplished critic recommended the colour of an old violin for the prevailing tint of a landscape. Constable replied by laying one upon the lawn before the house. This morning I have amused myself with looking at our home scenery, with reference to the rival theories; and certainly, at the first glance, I saw nothing of the Cremona' in tree, field, or lane. The white beech, stained over with faint, silvery green, is unlike the trunk of Hobbema or Both. But it might have stood to Constable for its portrait.

I think that the apparent contradiction may be explained. The colour of trees and grass depends chiefly on the light and distance in which they are viewed. Walk up to an elm, and mark the sunshine running along its sides, and afterwards retire to the end of the glade and look back; the bright tint will be sobered into a shadowy gloom, altogether different. The same change may be observed in the openings of a wood; and accordingly a poet, who has the true painter's eye, describes

The mossy pales that skirt the orchard green,

Here hid by shrubwood, there by glimpses seen;
And the brown pathway, that with careless flow
Sinks, and is lost among the trees below.

Wilkie says of one of Titian's famous landscapes, "The whites

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