or crushed dulness, or jealous rivalry, has sought to snatch hard-won laurels from the brow of genius.  As if these laurels were so smooth, and so soothing, as always to invite ambition, or as if they were so flexible as to suit every brow!  As if FIRE lurked not sometimes in their leaves, and as if there were not, besides, a nobler jealousy in the public mind ready to watch and to avenge their misappropriation.  Certain it is that not only, as Johnson remarks, was the attempt made to rob Addison of “Cato,” and Pope of the “Essay of Criticism,” but it has a hundred times taken place in the history of poetry.  Rolt, as we saw in our late life of Akenside, tried to snatch the honour of writing “The Pleasures of Imagination” from its author.  Lauder accused Milton of plundering the Italians wholesale.  Scott’s early novels have only the other day been most absurdly claimed for his brother Thomas.  And notwithstanding Shakspeare’s well-known lines over his sepulchre at Stratford—­

  “Bless’d be the man who spares these stones,
    But curs’d be he who moves my bones”—­

a worse outrage has been recently committed on his memory, than were his dust, like Wickliffe’s, tossed out of his tomb into the Avon—­his plays have been, with as much stupidity as malice, attributed to Lord Bacon!  Homer, too, has been found out to be a myth; and we know not if even Dante’s originality has altogether passed unquestioned in this age of disbelief and downpulling; although what brow, save that thunder-scathed pile, could wear those scorched laurels, and who but the “man who had been in hell” could have written the “Inferno?” Worst of all, a class of writers have of late sought to prove that there is no such thing as originality—­that genius means just dexterous borrowing-that the “Appropriation Clause” is of divine right—­and have certainly proved themselves true to their own principles.

In 1647, circumstances brought our poet more closely in connexion with the royal family, and on one occasion he carried a message from the Queen to King Charles, then in prison.  He subsequently conducted, with great success, the King’s correspondence; and in April 1648 he conveyed the young Duke of York (afterwards James II.) from London to France, and delivered him to the charge of the Queen and the Prince of Wales.  He had, ere leaving Britain, written a translation of Cato-Major on Old Age.  While in France, attending on the exiled prince, he wrote a number of poetical pieces at his master’s desire; among others, a song in honour of an embassy to Poland, which he and Lord Crofts undertook for Charles II., and during which they are said to have collected L10,000 for the royal cause from the Scotchmen who then abounded in that country as travelling merchants or pedlars.  Meanwhile his political misdemeanours were punished by the Parliament confiscating the remnant of his estate.  In 1652, he returned to England penniless, and was supported by the Earl of Pembroke.  After