Hide me from day’s garish eye
    While the bee with HONIED thigh
                         Penseroso, v. 142.

The celebrated stanza in Gray’s Elegy seems partly to be borrowed.

    Full many a gem of purest ray serene
    The dark unfathom’d eaves of ocean bear: 
    Full many a flower is torn to blush unseen,
    And waste its sweetness in the desert air.

Pope had said: 

    There kept by charms conceal’d from mortal eye,
    Like roses that in deserts bloom and die.
                                        Rape of the Lock.

Young says of nature: 

In distant wilds by human eye unseen
She rears her flowers and spreads her velvet green;
Pure gurgling rills the lonely desert trace,
And waste their music on the savage race.

And Shenstone has—­

And like the desert’s lily bloom to fade! 
Elegy iv.

Gray was so fond of this pleasing imagery, that he repeats it in his Ode to the Installation; and Mason echoes it in his Ode to Memory.

Milton thus paints the evening sun: 

If chance the radiant SUN with FAREWELL SWEET
Extends his evening beam, the fields revive,
The birds their notes renew, &c.

          
                                                    Par.  Lost, B. ii. v. 492.

Can there be a doubt that he borrowed this beautiful farewell from an obscure poet, quoted by Poole, in his “English Parnassus,” 1657?  The date of Milton’s great work, I find since, admits the conjecture:  the first edition being that of 1669.  The homely lines in Poole are these,

To Thetis’ watery bowers the sun doth hie,
BIDDING FAREWELL unto the gloomy sky.

Young, in his “Love of Fame,” very adroitly improves on a witty conceit of Butler.  It is curious to observe that while Butler had made a remote allusion of a window to a pillory, a conceit is grafted on this conceit, with even more exquisite wit.

Each WINDOW like the PILLORY appears,
With HEADS thrust through:  NAILED BY THE EARS!
Hudibras, Part ii. c. 3, v. 301.

An opera, like a PILLORY, may be said
To NAIL OUR EARS down, and EXPOSE OUR HEAD. 
YOUNG’S Satires.

In the Duenna we find this thought differently illustrated; by no means imitative, though the satire is congenial.  Don Jerome alluding to the serenaders says, “These amorous orgies that steal the senses in the hearing; as they say Egyptian embalmers serve mummies, extracting the brain through the ears.”  The wit is original, but the subject is the same in the three passages; the whole turning on the allusion to the head and to the ears.

When Pope composed the following lines on Fame,