riente mori."

I have also a folio copy of Spenser, printed by Henry Hills for Jonathan
Edwin, London, 1679. In a short life therein printed, it says that he
was buried near Chaucer, 1596; and the frontispiece is an engraving of
his tomb, by E. White, which bears this epitaph:--

"Heare lyes (expecting the second comminge of our Saviour,
Christ Jesus) the body of Edmond Spenser, the Prince of Poets in
his tyme, whose Divine spirit needs noe othir witness than the
works which he left behind {482} him. He was borne in London in
the yeare 1510, and died in the yeare 1596."

Beneath are these lines:--

"Such is the tombs the Noble Essex gave
Great Spenser's learned reliques, such his grave:
Howe'er ill-treated in his life he were,
His sacred bones rest honourably here."

How are these two epitaphs, with their differing dates, to be
reconciled? Can he have been born in 1510, as the first one says "obiit
_immatura_ morte?" Now eighty-five is not very immature; and I believe
he entered at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1569, at which time he
would be fifty-nine, and that at a period when college education
commenced at an earlier age than now. Vertue's portrait, engraved 1727,
takes as a motto the last two lines of the first epitaph--"Anglica te
vivo," &c.

E.N.W

Southwark, April 29 1850.

* * * * *

BORROWED THOUGHTS.

Crenius wrote a dissertation _De Furibus Librariis_, and J. Conrad
Schwarz another _De Plagio Literario_, in which some curious
appropriations are pointed out; your pages have already contained some
additional recent instances. The writers thus pillaged might exclaim,
"Pereant iste qui _post_ nos nostra dixerunt." Two or three instances
have occurred to me which, I think, have not been noticed. Goldsmith's
_Madame Blaize_ is known to be a free version of _La fameuse La
Galisse_. His well-known epigram,--

"Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed,"

is borrowed from the following by the Chevalier de Cailly (or d'Aceilly,
as he writes himself) entitled,--

"_La Mort du Sieur Etienne_.

"Il est au bout de ses travaux,
Il a passe le Sieur Etienne;
En ce monde il eut tant des maux,
Qu'on ne croit pas qu'il revienne."

Another well-know epigram,--

"I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,"

is merely a version of the 33d epigram of the first books of those by
the witty Roger de Bussy, Comte de Rabutin:--