to his
predecessors satisfies the ambition of the first geniuses. The popular
notion of literary novelty is an idea more fanciful than exact. Many are
yet to learn that our admired originals are not such as they mistake them
to be; that the plans of the most original performances have been
borrowed; and that the thoughts of the most admired compositions are not
wonderful discoveries, but only truths, which the ingenuity of the author,
by arranging the intermediate and accessary ideas, has unfolded from that
confused sentiment, which those experience who are not accustomed to think
with depth, or to discriminate with accuracy. This Novelty in Literature
is, as Pope defines it,

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

Novelty, in its rigid acceptation, will not be found in any judicious
production.

Voltaire looked on everything as imitation. He observes that the most
original writers borrowed one from another, and says that the instruction
we gather from books is like fire--we fetch it from our neighbours, kindle
it at home, and communicate it to others, till it becomes the property of
all. He traces some of the finest compositions to the fountainhead; and
the reader smiles when he perceives that they have travelled in regular
succession through China, India, Arabia, and Greece, to France and to
England.

To the obscurity of time are the ancients indebted for that originality in
which they are imagined to excel, but we know how frequently they accuse
each other; and to have borrowed copiously from preceding writers was not
considered criminal by such illustrious authors as Plato and Cicero. The
AEneid of Virgil displays little invention in the incidents, for it unites
the plan of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.

Our own early writers have not more originality than modern genius may
aspire to reach. To imitate and to rival the Italians and the French
formed their devotion. Chaucer, Gower, and Gawin Douglas, were all
spirited imitators, and frequently only masterly translators. Spenser, the
father of so many poets, is himself the child of the Ausonian Muse. Milton
is incessantly borrowing from the poetry of his day. In the beautiful
Masque of Comus he preserved all the circumstances of the work he
imitated. Tasso opened for him the Tartarean Gulf; the sublime description
of the bridge may be found in Sadi, who borrowed it from the Turkish
theology; the paradise of fools is a wild flower, transplanted from