yard into a shady green lane, communicating with the neighbouring hamlet. On that bridge I stopt a minute longer, and yet another and another minute, for I listened to the voice of the running water; and methought it was yet more mellifluous, more soothing, more eloquent, at that still shadowy hour, when only that little star looked down upon it, with its tremulous beam, than when it danced and glittered in the warm glow of sunshine. There are hearts like that stream, and they will understand the metaphor.

The unutterable things I felt and heard in that mysterious music!-every sense became absorbed in that of hearing; and so spell-bound, I might have staid on that very spot till midnight, nay, till the stars paled before the morning beam, if the deep, solemn sound of the old church-clock had not broken in on my dream of profound abstraction, and startled me away with half incredulous surprise, as its iron tongue proclaimed, stroke upon stroke, the tenth hour of the night. A.

LISTEN, ladies, listen;
Listen while I say,
How Cupid was in prison,
And peril t'other day:

All ye who jeer and scoff him
Will joy to hear it of him!

Some damsels, proud, delighted,
Had caught him unespied;
And, by their strength united,

His hands behind him tied : His wings of down and feather They twisted both together.

His bitter grief I'm fearful

Can never be express'd,
Nor how his blue eyes tearful
Rain'd down his ivory breast.
To nought can I resemble
What I to think of tremble.
These fair but foul murdresses
Then stript his beamy wings,
And cropt his golden tresses

That flow'd in wanton rings. He could not choose but languish, While writhing in such anguish.

They to an oak-tree took him,
Its sinewy arms that spread,
And there they all forsook him,
To hang till he was dead.
Ah was not this inhuman ?

Yet still 'twas done by woman!

This life were mere vexation,
Had love indeed been slain ;
The soul of our creation!

The antidote of pain!

Air, sea, earth, sans his presence, Would lose their chiefest pleasance.

But his immortal mother

His suffering chanc'd to see; First this band then the other, She cut and set him free.

He vengeance vow'd, and kept it; And thousands since have wept it.

For being no forgiver,

With gold and leaden darts He fill'd his rattling quiver,

And pierc'd with gold the hearts Of lovers young, who never Could hope, yet lov'd for ever.

With leaden shaft, not forceless,

'Gainst happy lover's state He aim'd with hand remorseless, And turn'd their love to hate. Their love long cherish'd, blasting With hatred everlasting.

Ye fair ones, who so often

At Cupid's power have laugh'à, Your scornful pride now soften Beware his vengeful shaft ! His quiver bright and burnish'd With love or hate is furnish'd.

PAUL JONES.

An old correspondent sends us the following note to correct the account, given in our last, of Paul Jones's birthplace.

Mr.

for

"I thank you, and Mr. the communication respecting Paul Jones. seems to have followed the popular story of Paul's early years; for I am well aware that be is generally described as the son of Lord Selkirk's gardener. And truly a mistake of some twenty miles of barren coast is, after all, no very important matter, unless to the natives, who, God help them, only produce, perhaps once in seven centuries, a man whom the world thinks worthy of remembrance, and may be unwilling to be deprived of him in the haste of biography. You may inform Mr. that Paul was born at Arbingland, in the parish of Kirkbean; and that so far from dying in wretchedness, his sisters, of whom he left two, obtained considerable property by the event. I have often heard of his opulence, and never of his poverty -though I do not mean to say, that the wily Caledonian was not capable of pretending extreme poverty, in order to cheat those very liberal gentlemen, the French Convention, out of his burial money, to enrich his friends in Scotland."

PLAGIARISMS.

There is a difficulty in saying what are plagiarisms; and, as a first step to clear it away, let us lay down what plagiarisms are. Darwin's idea of them requires correction: "Where the sentiment and the expression are both borrowed, there can be no doubt; -single words, on the contrary, taken from other authors cannot convict a writer of plagiarism; they are lawful game, wild by nature, the property of all who can capture them ;-and, perhaps, a few common flowers of speech may be gathered, as we pass over our neighbour's enclosure, without stigmatizing us with the name of thieves;but we must not therefore plunder his cultivated fruits." Here is the mischief of metaphor when a man is defining. As to single words, they are

dictionary matter, and of course all that can be borrowed is their position and application, which may constitute plagiarism as much as any thing else. If, by common flowers of speech, it is meant that there is no individual jus rerum, they are, therefore, incapable of being stolen; if common means vulgar, they are not worth stealing. However we may now class the flowers of the botanic garden (once supposed perennial), Darwin would not have been well pleased to have seen them transplanted into another man's waste :— therefore, so long as the proprietor and the thief give the value to the article, which their respective relations to it imply, there is no distinction to be made between flowers and fruits.

New thoughts and new modes of expression are literary property; and culpable plagiarism is the conscious and unavowed appropriation, without improvement of them.

The fault of plagiarism is in the nonavowal of the fact, and in that only. The mischief of plagiarism falls upon the plagiarist, and upon none beside.

1st. Of the mischief-for by that must the fault be judged, in so far as it is separable from its motive. If a man's ideas are not known to the world, he cannot be injured in the useless possession of them: if they are known to the world, to him, as their author, will the world surely attribute them, with whomsoever else they may be found. There is, therefore, no cause for the indignation which many authors have felt at being robbed, unless we suppose it purely moral indignation. The only way in which the theft can injure the owner is, by making his rival richer, which he may think equivalent to making himself poorer; but, when men are sufficiently on a level to be rivals for fame, they are both too well known in their works not to have their rights and claims properly adjusted. Lord Byron has borrowed the most beautiful passage Coleridge ever wrote; and in point of genius, though by no means in regard to the employment and productions of genius, these men may be considered as two great poetical rivals.-

Mr. Coleridge has not suffered by this, and the plagiarism has availed nothing to Lord Byron, because it is obvious and unqualified; and therefore by every reader acquainted with poetry, it is appropriated to its author. Mr. Coleridge's original is in Christabel.

Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above :
And life is thorny; and youth is vain:
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain :
They parted ne'er to meet again,—
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining-
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder
Shall wholly do away, I ween,

The marks of that which once hath been.

ly.-Thus we have shown, 1st. That the only way in which plagiarism can injure the plagiarized is, by benefitting the plagiarist, he being a rival. 2d. That, occurring between rivals, it is innocent when obvious,--whence it follows, that to be culpable it must be for the worst or for the better. 3dly. That with improvement there is no right of complaint against the plagiarist. Now, 4thly. Without improvement what can it profit him?—And (by the first) if there is no profit there is no injury.

2d. Of the fault. Since the mischief falls entirely upon the plagiarist, the fault lies in the motive, and not in the effect of the act. There may be many motives for plagiarism, some of them praise-worthy; but for withhold

Heights which appear as lovers who have parted
In hate, whose mining depths so intervene,
That they can meet no more, though broken-heart-
ed, &c.

There is no harm in this, as we have said-nor any good got by it: but we must allow there are less artless manners of plagiarizing, which are as far as advancing one competitor equals impeding the other, more ininjurious to the plundered. A man's assistance may be had without taking the work of his hands whole, and leaving it as he left it; and it is the plagiarist by halves whom there is a difficulty in convicting. According to the definition there must be a negation of improvement to constitute culpability; for the cause of poetry requires, that every man should be allowed to start from his predecessor's ground, provided he over-stretches his goal ;and thus far no one has a right to complain; for it is to be presumed each took the same advantage which he affords. In this, as in other cases, if a general law be observed, all men's opportunities will measure alike; and the law ought to be laid down upon the principle of what makes for the cause of poetry. Principles may be Principles may be understood, (which is the main matter) yet their application to particular cases remains for casuists to determine. We shall look into a few cases present

one motive, and that disingenuous ;the wish to obtain credit upon false pretences.

Having stated the general principles which relate to the subject, we come now to particular manners of plagiarism. We have said, generally,

that it is innocent where there is an improvement; but this must depend upon the degree of improvement; if it outweighs the merit of the original passage, an author would cheat himself by saying he had his idea from another (for a reader will not take the trouble to examine a detail of the case, and allot each his portion of merit); if, on the contrary, the merit of the improvement is slight in proportion to that of the original, he who conceals his original commits plagiarism. It is highly expedient, that a man of great genius should plagiarize ;-that he should regenerate the thoughts of his inferiors, giving them the cast of his own mind in order that they may put on immortality after their new birth: but in so doing he should, for his own sake, conform to the above rule of avowal.Thus the treasures of poetry would descend from hand to hand, improved by by every succession. Isolated ideas, originating with men of scanty imagination, would not be merged by the barrenness of their works, like the Arabian rivulets in the sand, but bring their tribute to some great stream, quæ

Beware of enyy as much as possibly thou canst, that by it thou be not brought to mislike of any man, to speak in derogation of him, to prefer thyself before him, to molest and vex him, and to be also thyself vexed, if he be preferred before thee, with his virtue, with his honour, with his commendation, or with his spiritual profit. To overcome this temptation be more courteous and lowly unto him, my daughter, than to another, speak nothing of him thyself, nor hear him spoken of in his absence; neither let any thing proceed from thee in word, deed, or show, that may seem to savour of envy, or to spring from that venomous root. Howard's Letters.

SNAKES.

Professor Luigi Metoxa, of Rome, has published an account of some sin. gular experiments made by him on snakes. Among others he endeavoured to ascertain the truth of the assertions of the ancients respecting the predilection of snakes for music and daneing. In the month of July, 1822, about noon, he put into a large box a

46 ATHENEUM VOL. 1. new series.

number of different kinds of snakes, all quite lively, with the exception of some vipers, which were enclosed in a separate box. As soon as they heard the harmonious tones of an organ, all the non-venomous serpents became agitated in an extraordinary manner;— they attached themselves to the sides of the box, and made every effort to escape. The elaphis and the coluber Esculapii turned towards the instrument. The vipers for their part ex-' hibited no symptoms of sensibility.— This experiment has been frequently repeated, and always with the same results.

JOANNA BAILLIE AND MR. BEDDOES.

How the bloom should gather on those two celebrated authors' cheeks, to find a woman and a boy instructing their skilless manhood in the vernacular language of the British Muse! Joanna Baillie and young Beddoes, a female extern and a freshman, teaching Byron and Barry Cornwall, after a regular graduation in the college of English Minstrels, their own poetical mother-tongue, the very elements of their native poetical dialect, which they have either forgotten, or corrupted with a base intermixture of foreign principles. I am no panegyrist of ladies' poetry; I am very far indeed from being a cavalier in the cause of female genius; in fact, generally speaking, I despise the one and I dispute the other; but in the case of Miss Baillie, justice fortunately coincides with gallantry, and I may assert her praises without the imputation of gratuitous knight-errantry. This lady denies her sex almost irrefutably in the following passage (De Monfort's soliloquy before he murders Rezenvelt):

How hollow groans the earth beneath my tread!
Is there an echo here? Methinks it sounds
As though some heavy footstep follow'd me.

I will advance no farther.

Deep settled shadows rest across the path,

And thickly-tangled boughs o'er-hang this spot.
O that a tenfold gloom did cover it!
That midst the murky darkness I might strike.

As in the wild confusion of a dream,

Things horrid, bloody, terrible, do pass
As though they pass'd not; nor impress the mind

With the fix'd clearness of reality.

What sound is that? It is the screech-owl's cry.

Foul bird of night! What spirit guides thee here?

Art thou instinctive drawn to scenes of horror?
I've heard of this.

How those fall'n leaves do rustle on the path,
With whispering noise, as tho' the earth around me
Did utter secret things!

The distant river, too, bears to mine ear

A distant wailing. O mysterious night!
Thou art not silent, many tongues hast thou.

A distant gathering blast sounds through the wood,
And dark clouds fleetly hasten o'er the sky:
O that a storm would rise, a raging storm;
Amidst the roar of warring elements

my

I'd lift my hand and strike: but this pale light, The calm distinctness of each stilly thing, Is terrible. De Monfort, A. 4, Sc. 1. The fair authoress has put off the woman here with the happiest success. She has apostatized very creditably from the principles of maudlin composition which regulate she-poets in general. I do not mean to say that Miss Baillie could write a tragedy; and I am very sure that she is not Shakspeare either in or out of" petticoats;" but that her play of DE MONFORT would do honour to either sex, is blunt opinion. In the above extract, two particulars may be remarked. First: that the language is formed on the true model of English blank verse, each line ending with a pause and a sounding close; thereby avoiding the protracted feebleness of prose-poetry, which often winds down the page through several lines, without the decasyllabic recurrence of pauses and closes. Second that the imagery, if not exactly suited to dramatic effect (being perhaps more romantic than tragic), is at least not that of still life or nature asleep, as most of our modern tragic imagery is; and that the sentiments, if they do not press on each other with sufficient rapidity and impetuosity, are nevertheless agitating and impassioned in their nature, not languific and soulsmoothing, after the manner of Evadne or Mirandola,-they are provocatives, not sedatives, of the mind. Nay, it would not be very difficult to detect many of the images and sentiments of Macbeth in the passage just quoted; the beginning and concluding lines immediately suggest these as their respective prototypes :

Thou sure and firm-set earth
Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear
The very stones prate of my whereabout-
And

Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell!
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes.

But as to the particular of metre :— it may be said that our authoress preceded the epoch of prose-poetry.

However: here is Minor Beddoes, born in the very zenith of this mocksun of poetry, whilst it is culminating in the mid-heaven of our literary hemisphere, shining in watery splendour, the gaze and gape of our foolish-faced fat-headed nation: here is Minor Beddoes, I say, born amidst the very rage and triumph of the Byronian heresy,nay, in a preface more remarkable for good-nature than good-sense, eulogizing some of the prose-poets, yet what does Minor Beddoes? Why, writing a tragedy himself, with a judgment far different from that exhibited in his panegyrical preface, he totally rejects,and therefore tacitly condemns and abjures the use of prose-poetry. But it was not the boy's judgment which led him to this; it was his undepraved ear.and his native energy of mind, teaching him to respue this effeminate style of versification. The Bride's Tragedy transcends, in the quality of its rhythm and metrical harmony, the Doge of Venice and Mirandola; just as much as it does Fazio, and the other dramas which conform to the rules of genuine English heroic verse, in the energy of its language,the power of its sentiments, and the boldness of its imagery-that is, incalculably. The impassioned sublimity of this speech of Hesperus (after he has murdered Floribel), is a nearer approach to the vein of our dramatic school of tragedy, than I can recognize in either the rhetoric or poetic :