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 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!