race, as well as Tully, might discover that records are
needful to preserve the memory of actions, and that no records were so
durable as poems; either of them might find out that life is short, and
that we consume it in unnecessary labour.

There are other flowers of fiction so widely scattered and so easily
cropped, that it is scarcely just to tax the use of them as an act by
which any particular writer is despoiled of his garland; for they may be
said to have been planted by the ancients in the open road of poetry for
the accommodation of their successors, and to be the right of every one
that has art to pluck them without injuring their colours or their
fragrance. The passage of Orpheus to hell, with the recovery and second
loss of Eurydice, have been described after Boetius by Pope, in such a
manner as might justly leave him suspected of imitation, were not the
images such as they might both have derived from more ancient writers.

_Quae sontes agitant metu,
Ultrices scelerum deae
Jam masta: lacrymis madent,
Non Ixionium caput
Velox praecipitat rota_.

The pow'rs of vengeance, while they hear,
Touch'd with compassion, drop a tear:
Ixion's rapid wheel is bound,
Fix'd in attention to the sound. F. LEWIS.

Thy stone, O Sysiphus, stands still,
Ixion rests upon the wheel,
And the pale spectres dance!
The furies sink upon their iron beds. POPE

_Tandem, vincimur, arbiter
Umbrarum, miserans, ait--
Donemus, comitem viro,
Emtam carmine, conjugem_.

Subdu'd at length, Hell's pitying monarch cry'd,
The song rewarding, let us yield the bride. F. LEWIS.

He sung; and hell consented
To hear the poet's prayer;
Stern Proserpine relented,
And gave him back the fair. POPE

_Heu, noctis prope terminos
Orpheus Eurydicen suam
Vidit, perdidit, occidit_.

Nor yet the golden verge of day begun,
When Orpheus, her unhappy lord,
Eurydice to life restor'd,
At once beheld, and lost, and was undone. F. LEWIS.

But soon, too soon, the lover turns his eyes:
Again she falls, again she dies, she dies! POPE.

No writer can be fully convicted of imitation, except there is a
concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by
chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series
or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are
copied. Thus it can scarcely be doubted