ly trick of his Lordship to filch good things.
In the lamentation for Kirke White, in which he compares him to an
eagle wounded by an arrow feathered from his own wing, he says,

So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
View'd his own feather on the fatal dart
And winged the shaft that quivered in his heart.

The ancients have certainly stolen the best ideas of the moderns;
this very thought may be found in the works of that ancient-modern,
Waller:

That eagle's fate and mine are one,
Which on the shaft that made him die,
Espied a feather of his own
Wherewith he wont to soar on high.

His Lordship disdained to commit any larceny on me; and no doubt the
following passage from The Giaour is perfectly original:

It is as if the dead could feel
The icy worm around them steal;
And shudder as the reptiles creep
To revel o'er their rotting sleep,
Without the power to scare away
The cold consumers of their clay.

I do not claim any paternity in these lines: but not the most
judicious action of all my youth was to publish certain dramatic
sketches, and his Lordship had the printed book in his possession
long before The Giaour was published, and may have read the following
passage in a dream, which was intended to be very hideous:

Then did I hear around
The churme and chirruping of busy reptiles
At hideous banquet on the royal dead:--
Full soon methought the loathsome epicures
Came thick on me, and underneath my shroud
I felt the many-foot and beetle creep,
And on my breast the cold worm coil and crawl.

However, I have said quite enough on this subject, both as respects
myself and his seeming plagiarisms, which might be multiplied to
legions. Such occasional accidental imitations are not things of
much importance. All poets, and authors in general, avail themselves
of their reading and knowledge to enhance the interest of their
works. It can only be considered as one of Lord Byron's spurts of
spleen, that he felt so much about a "coincidence," which ought not
to have disturbed him; but it may be thought by the notice taken of
it, that it disturbs myself more than it really does; and that it
would have been enough to have merely said--Perhaps, when some friend
is hereafter doing as indulgently for me, the same kind of task that
I have undertaken for Byron, there may be found among my memoranda
notes as little flattering to his Lords