in my note-books, more than one instance of
similarity of thought, incident, or expression that I have met with
during a somewhat desultory course of reading. These instances I shall
take the liberty of laying before you from time to time, leaving you and
your readers to decide whether such similarity be the effect of
_accident_ or _design_; but I flatter myself that they may be accepted
as _parallel passages_ and _illustrations_, even by those who may differ
from me in the opinion I have formed on the relation which my "loci
inter se comparandi" bear to each other.

In Lady Blessington's _Conversations with Lord Byron_, pages 176, 177.,
the poet is represented as stating that the lines--

"While Memory, with more than Egypt's art,
Embalming all the sorrows of the heart,
Sits at the altar which she raised to woe,
And feeds the source whence tears eternal flow!"

suggested to his mind, "by an unaccountable and incomprehensible power
of association," the thought--

"Memory, the mirror which affliction dashes to the earth, and,
looking down upon the fragments, only beholds the reflection
multiplied."

afterwards apparently embodied in _Childe Harold_, iii. 33.

"Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies; and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same, and still the more, the more it breaks."

Now, Byron was, by his own showing, _an ardent admirer_ of Burton's
_Anatomy of Melancholy_. See Moore's _Life of Byron_, vol. i. page 144.
Notices of the year 1807.

Turn to Burton, and you will find the following passage:--

"And, as Praxiteles did by his glass, when he saw a scurvy face in
it, brake it to pieces, but for that one, he saw many more as bad
in a moment."--Part 2. sect. 3. mem. 7.

I am uncharitable enough to believe that _Childe Harold_ owes far more
to Burton, than to "the unaccountable and incomprehensible power of
association."

MELANION.

* * * * *

BILLINGSGATE.

I think your correspondent in No. 6. p. 93., starts on wrong premises;
he seems to take for granted that such a structure as Belin's Gate
really existed. Now the story entirely rests on the assertion of
Geoffrey of Monmouth. What amount of credit may be placed on that
veracious and most unromantic historian, your correspondent doubtless
knows better than myself. Geoffrey says, in the 10th chap. of the 3rd
book, that Belin, amo