inally have been discovered
in the following humble verses in a poem once considered not as
contemptible:

A gentle _lamb_ has rhetoric to plead,
And when she sees the butcher's knife decreed,
Her voice entreats him not to make her bleed.
DR. KING'S _Mully of Mountown_.

This natural and affecting image might certainly have been observed by
Pope, without his having perceived it through the less polished lens of
the telescope of Dr. King. It is, however, a _similarity_, though it
may not be an _imitation_; and is given as an example of that art in
composition which can ornament the humblest conception, like the
graceful vest thrown over naked and sordid beggary.

I consider the following lines as strictly copied by Thomas Warton:

The daring artist
Explored the pangs that rend the royal breast,
_Those wounds that lurk beneath the tissued vest_.
T. WARTON on Shakspeare.

Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Defence of Poesie," has the same image. He
writes, "Tragedy openeth the greatest _wounds_, and showeth forth the
_ulcers_ that are _covered with tissue_."

The same appropriation of thought will attach to the following lines of
Tickell:

While the charm'd reader with thy thought complies,
And views thy _Rosamond_ with _Henry's_ eyes.
TICKELL to ADDISON.

Evidently from the French Horace:

En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue;
Tout Paris, pour _Chimene_, a les yeux de _Rodrigue_.
BOILEAU.

Oldham, the satirist, says in his satires upon the Jesuits, that had
Cain been of this black fraternity, he had not been content with a
quarter of mankind.

Had he been Jesuit, _had he but put on
Their savage cruelty, the rest had gone!_
Satire ii.

Doubtless at that moment echoed in his poetical ear the energetic and
caustic epigram of Andrew Marvel, against Blood stealing the crown
dressed in a parson's cassock, and sparing the life of the keeper:

With the Priest's vestment _had he but put on
The Prelate's cruelty--the Crown had gone!_

The following passages seem echoes to each other, and it is but justice
due to Oldham, the satirist, to acknowledge him as the parent of this
antithesis:

On Butler who can think without just rage,