Oblivion lies hard by her drowsie brother,
Who readily knowes not her selfe nor other:
Then solitary Morpheus gently rockt:

Confusedly about the silent bed

Fantastick swarms of Dreams there hovered.
Green, red, and yellow, tawny, black, and blue:
Some sacred, some profane; some false, some true;

They made no noyse, but right resemble may
Th' unnumber'd moats which in the sun do play,
When (at some cranny) with his piercing eye
He peepeth in some darker place to spy.
Thither th' Almighty (with a just intent
To plague those tyrants pride) his angels sent,
No sooner entred, but the radiant shine
Of's glistring wings, and of his glorious eyn,
As light as noon makes the darke house of night,
The gawdy swarm of dreams is put to flight, &c."

This page of Du Bartas was before Milton when he wrote as follows:

Hence vain deluding joys

Dwell in some idle brain,

And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess,

As thick and numberless

As the gay motes that people the sun-beams,

Or likest hovering dreams

The fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train.

When Milton wrote,

part huge of bulk

Wallowing unwieldy, enormous in their gate,
Tempest the ocean: there Leviathan,
Hugest of living creatures, on the deep

Stretch'd like a promontory, sleeps or swims,

And seems a moving land.

Il. Pens.

P. Lost, b. VIL. 410.

he had the following lines of Sylvester before him :

"When on the surges I perceive from far,
Th' ork, whirl-poole whale, or huffing physeter,
Methinks I see the wand'ring isle again
(Ortygian Delos) floating on the main.

And when in combat these fell monsters cross
Me seems some tempest all the seas doth toss."

P. 40

Dr. Young has borrowed Milton's term "to tempest (which was suggested by Du Bartas)"

"those too strong

Tumultuous rise and tempest human life."

Night 1.

Mr. Warton, in a note p. 186, vol. II. "History of English Poetry," says, that Milton, when he mentions the swan, the cock, and the peacock, together, Par. Lost, b. VII. 438, had his eye upon a passage in Douglas, a fine old Scotch poet: but I am inclined to believe him mistaken, and rather to have had his eye on a passage in Du Bartas, who mentions the crane, peacock, and cock, together:

the crested cock, whose clarion sounds
The silent hours; and th' other, whose gay train
Adorns him, colour'd with the florid hue
Of rainbows and starry-eyes.

MILTON

"There the fair peacock, beautifully brave,
Proud, portly-strouting, stalking, stately-grave,
Wheeling his starry-trayn, in pomp displayes
His glorious eyes to Phoebus' golden rayes.
Close by his side stands the courageous cock,
Crest-peoples king, the peasant's trusty clock,
True morning watch, Aurora's trumpeter, &c."
SYLVESTER, p. 46. ed. 1641.

Milton had just before mentioned the crane.

1786, May and June. 1787, Dec.

C. T, O.

XC. Parallel Passages in Authors of Note.

MR. URBAN,

THE following miscellaneous observations are much at your

service.

C. T. O.

MALLET, who is by no means despicable as a minor poet, deserves more credit for his Edwin and Emma than for any other of his works. He seems to have had Shakespeare in his eye in the following stanza:

Nor let the pride of great ones scorn
This charmer of the plains;

That sun which bids their diamond blaze
To deck our lily deigns.

See Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, scene 7.

Ed. and Em.

his court

"The self-same sun that shines upon
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on alike-

"

The following passage from Daniel, which forms a part of a very beautiful and pathetic speech of Richard, during his confinement at Pomfret, is not unlike a passage in Shake speare.

Thou sitt'st at home, safe by thy quiet fire,
And hear'st of others harms, but feelest none;
And there thou tell'st of kings, and who aspire,
Who fall, who rise, who triumph, who do moan-
Perhaps thou talk'st of me.

See Shakespeare,

LXVI. Book iii. Civil Wars.

66 -let's away to prison :

We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out; &c. &c."
Lear, Act 5. sc. 2.

M. Drayton, in the following passage, reminds us of a most spirited description in Shakespeare's Henry IV.

Prince Edward all in gold, as he great Jove had been, The Mountfords all in plumes, like ostriches were seen. Page 342. fol. edit.

-all furnish'd, all in arms,

All plum'd like estridges, and with the wind
Baiting like eagles having lately bath'd :
Glittering in golden coates like images;
As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at Midsummer;
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.
I saw young Harry, with his beaver up,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd,
Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury.

Shakespeare.

Drayton, in a passage where he personifies the Peak of Derbyshire, has the following idea, which reminds us of a very sublime passage in Shakespeare that becomes ridiculous from a single vulgar expression, as has been before remarked by Dr. Johnson, in his Rambler:

O ye, my lovely joys, my darlings, in whose eyes
Horror assumes her seat, from whose abiding flies
Thick vapours, that like rugs still hang the troubled air.
Polyolb. song 26.

See Macbeth-where he talks of the blanket of the night. Spenser seems to have suggested the leading idea in that well-known song in Cymbeline, beginning

Hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings;
My lady sweet arise-

without the hyperbole of heaven's gate

!

Wake now my love, awake; for it is time;
The rosy morn long since left Tithon's bed,
All ready to her silver coach to clime,
And Phoebus 'gins to shew his glorious head.
Hark, how the chearful birds do chaunt their layes,
And carol of love's praise.

The merry lark her mattins sings aloft,

VOL. II.

Ah! my dear love, why do ye sleep thus long,
When meeter were that ye should now awake?
Hughes's Spen. V. p. 95.

It is singular that this passage should not be quoted in
Johnson's and Steevens's Shakespeare.

There is a similarity in the following expressions of Shakespeare and Cowley.

that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, on this bank and shoal of time-

Cowley, speaking of this world

Macbeth, Act I. Sc. 7.

Vain weak-built isthmus, which does proudly rise
Up betwixt two eternities.

Cowley's Life and Fame. What Dr. Johnson has said of Akenside, Life, p. 442, reminds us of the following passages:

The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts the mind, and settles in the ear. Johnson.

And call the listning soul into the ear.

Oldham's Ode on St. Cecilia.

None was so marble; but, whilst him he hears,

His soul so long dwelt only in his ears.

Elegie on Dr. Donne, by Sir L. Cary.

And here a female atheist talks you dead.

Johnson's London.

Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead.

Pope's Essay on Crit.

Celestial themes confess'd his tuneful aid;
And heaven that lent him genius was repaid.

Goldsm. Epit. on Dr. Parnell.

This last line contains the same thought with a stanza in Dr. Johnson's Elegy on Levett:

His virtues walk'd their narrow round,

Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure th' Eternal Master found

The single talent well employ'd.

Dr. Johnson has said, that gloriosus is never used in a good sense: we find it, however, used in a good sense by a very