Let me premise that these notices (the wrecks of a large collection of passages I had once formed merely as exercises to form my taste) are not given with the petty malignant delight of detecting the unacknowledged imitations of our best writers, but merely to habituate the young student to an instructive amusement, and to exhibit that beautiful variety which the same image is capable of exhibiting when retouched with all the art of genius.

Gray, in his “Ode to Spring,” has

    The Attic warbler POURS HER THROAT.

Wakefield in his “Commentary” has a copious passage on this poetical diction.  He conceives it to be “an admirable improvement of the Greek and Roman classics:” 

    —­keen auden:  HES.  Scut.  Her. 396. 
    —­Suaves ex ore loquelas
    Funde.  LUCRET. i. 40.

This learned editor was little conversant with modern literature, as he proved by his memorable editions of Gray and Pope.  The expression is evidently borrowed not from Hesiod, nor from Lucretius, but from a brother at home.

Is it for thee, the Linnet POURS HER THROAT?
Essay on Man, Ep. iii, v. 33.

Gray, in the “Ode to Adversity,” addresses the power thus,

Thou tamer of the human breast,
Whose IRON SCOURGE and TORTURING HOUR
The bad affright, afflict the best.

Wakefield censures the expression “torturing hour,” by discovering an impropriety and incongruity.  He says, “consistency of figure rather required some material image, like iron scourge and adamantine chain.”  It is curious to observe a verbal critic lecture such a poet as Gray!  The poet probably would never have replied, or, in a moment of excessive urbanity, he might have condescended to point out to this minutest of critics the following passage in Milton:—­

——­When the SCOURGE
Inexorably, and the TORTURING HOUR
Calls us to penance.

                                      Par.  Lost, B. ii. v. 90.

Gray, in his “Ode to Adversity,” has

Light THEY DISPERSE, and with them go
The SUMMER FRIEND.

Fond of this image, he has it again in his “Bard,”

They SWARM, that in thy NOONTIDE BEAM are born,
Gone!

Perhaps the germ of this beautiful image may be found in Shakspeare:—­

——­ for men, like BUTTERFLIES,
Show not their mealy wings but to THE SUMMER.
Troilus and Cressida, Act iii. s. 7.

And two similar passages in Timon of Athens:—­

The swallow follows not summer more willingly than we your lordship.

Timon.  Nor more willingly leaves winter; such summer birds are
men.—­Act iii.

Again in the same,

    ——­one cloud of winter showers
    These flies are couch’d.—­Act ii.

Gray, in his “Progress of Poetry,” has