the
wilderness of Ariosto. The rich poetry of Gray is a wonderful tissue,
woven on the frames, and composed with the gold threads, of others. To
Cervantes we owe Butler; and the united abilities of three great wits, in
their _Martinus Scriblerus_, could find no other mode of conveying
their powers but by imitating at once Don Quixote and Monsieur Oufle.
Pope, like Boileau, had all the ancients and moderns in his pay; the
contributions he levied were not the pillages of a bandit, but the taxes
of a monarch. Swift is much indebted for the plans of his two very
original performances: he owes the "Travels of Gulliver" to the "Voyages
of Cyrano de Bergerac to the Sun and Moon;" a writer, who, without the
acuteness of Swift, has wilder flashes of fancy; Joseph Warton has
observed many of Swift's strokes in Bishop Godwin's "Man in the Moon,"
who, in his turn, must have borrowed his work from Cyrano. "The Tale of a
Tub" is an imitation of such various originals, that they are too numerous
here to mention. Wotton observed, justly, that in many places the author's
wit is not his own. Dr. Ferriar's "Essay on the Imitations of Sterne"
might be considerably augmented. Such are the writers, however, who
imitate, but remain inimitable!

Montaigne, with honest naivete, compares his writings to a thread that
binds the flowers of others; and that, by incessantly pouring the waters
of a few good old authors into his sieve, some drops fall upon his paper.
The good old man elsewhere acquaints us with a certain stratagem of his
own invention, consisting of his inserting whole sentences from the
ancients, without acknowledgment, that the critics might blunder, by
giving _nazardes_ to Seneca and Plutarch, while they imagined they tweaked
his nose. Petrarch, who is not the inventor of that tender poetry of which
he is the model, and Boccaccio, called the father of Italian novelists,
have alike profited by a studious perusal of writers, who are now only
read by those who have more curiosity than taste. Boiardo has imitated
Pulci, and Ariosto, Boiardo. The madness of Orlando Furioso, though it
wears, by its extravagance, a very original air, is only imitated from Sir
Launcelot in the old romance of "Morte Arthur," with which, Warton
observes, it agrees in every leading circumstance; and what is the
Cardenio of Cervantes but the Orlando of Ariosto? Tasso has imitated the
_Iliad_, and enriched his poem with episodes from the _AEneid_. It is
curiou