he perception of the plagiarism rather increases than
diminishes the pleasure with which we read either
deathless work. Republican although he were, the great poet
sits a throned king upon Parnassus, privileged to cull
flowers where he listeth in right of his immortal laurel-
crown.

Phoebe loved flowers; and from the earliest tuft of violets ensconced
under the sunny southern hedge, to the last lingering sprig of woodbine
shaded by some time-hallowed oak, the blossoms of the meadow and the
coppice were laid under contribution for her posies.

Phoebe had her own little garden; and to fill that garden, Jesse was
never weary of seeking after the roots of such wild plants as he himself
thought pretty, or such as he found (one can hardly tell how) were
considered by better judges to be worthy of a place in the parterre.
The different orchises, for instance, the white and lilac primrose, the
golden oxslip, the lily of the valley, the chequered fritillary, which
blows so freely along the banks of the Kennett, and the purple campanula
which covers with equal profusion the meadows of the Thames, all found
their way to Phoebe's flower-plats. He brought her in summer evenings
glow-worms enough to form a constellation on the grass; and would spend
half a July day in chasing for her some glorious insect, dragon-fly, or
bee-bird, or golden beetle, or gorgeous butterfly. He not only bestowed
upon her sloes, and dew-berries, and hazel-nuts "brown as the squirrel
whose teeth crack 'em," but caught for her the squirrel itself. He
brought her a whole litter of dormice, and tamed for her diversion a
young magpie, whose first effort at flattery was "Pretty Phoebe!"

But his greatest present of all, most prized both by donor and receiver,
(albeit her tender heart smote her as she accepted it, and she made her
faithful slave promise most faithfully to take nests no more,) was a
grand string of birds' eggs, long enough to hang in festoons round, and
round, and round her play-room, and sufficiently various and beautiful
to gratify more fastidious eyes than those of our little heroine.

To collect this rope of variously-tinted beads--a natural rosary--he
had sought the mossy and hair-lined nest of the hedge-sparrow for her
turquoise-like rounds; had scrambled up the chimney-corner to bear away
those pearls of the land, the small white eggs of the house-martin; had
found deposited in an old magpie's nest the ovals of