70 REVIEWS. 



minor faults, if faults they be at all. The poems, I repeat, themselves 

 are good, very good, and the volume, a small one of 439 pages, is a 

 capital present to make to a friend, especially in these days when "capital" 

 of another kind bears far too much sway, and it is not every one who 

 has the healthy tone of Mr. Aird, and fewer still, who, if they have it, 

 can commit it to good poetry. 

 The last line of the volume — 



"And set in the bosom of her God," 



reminds me of those of Gray — 



"There they alike in trembling hope repose, 

 The bosom of his father and his God;" 



but even if borrowed, intentionally or unintentionally, this is either a trifling 

 fault or no fault at all, and if the one or the other, it is one committed 

 in very good company. Thus it has been shewn, (by Dr. Doran,) that, 

 as Bulwer has observed, "Books are magnets to which all iron minds 

 insensibly move," and as examples of this he gives quotations to prove it. 

 — Spenser has borrowed from Tasso and Ariosto; Merivale from Dante; 

 Lord Bacon from Giordano Bruno; Goldsmith from Young; Pope from 

 Milton, Shakespeare, Charron, and Flatman; Shelley from Sir Thomas 

 Browne; Gray from Milton, Bishop Hall, and Lucretius; Byron from Burton, 

 Dante, Waller, and Goethe; Tennyson from Anacreon; Sir Robert Cotton 

 from the Public Record; Hacket from Camden; Rogers from Gray; Camp- 

 bell from Blair and Vaughan; Parnell from Martin Luther; Sterne from 

 Burton, Rabelais, Montaigne, Bayle, and Leightenhouse; Thomson from 

 Homer; Moore from Waller; Shakespeare from Barnfield and Beaumont and 

 Fletcher; Milton from Grotius, Petrarch, Dante, Ariosto, and Ramsay; 

 Madame de Genlis from Rousseau and Voltaire; Adam Clarke from Dr. 

 Gill; Matthew Henry from Bishop Hall; Scott from Matthew Henry; 

 Captain Marryatt from Kendall and Gregg; Franklin from Logan and 

 Jeremy Taylor. 



"Every one of my writings," says Goethe, in the true spirit of candour, 

 "has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons in a thousand 

 different things; the learned and the ignorant, the wise and the foolish, 

 infancy and age, have come in turn, generally without having the least 

 suspicion of it, to bring me the offering of their thoughts, their faculties, 

 their experience; often have they sown the harvest I have reaped. My 

 work is that of an aggregation of human beings; taken from the .whale 

 of nature, it bears the name of Goethe." 



"When I was a young man," says Goldsmith, "being anxious to dis- 

 tinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new propositions; but I soon 

 gave this over, for I found that generally what was new was false." 



