The lamb, thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
    Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? 
    Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food,
    And licks the hand just rais’d to shed his blood.

After pausing on the last two fine verses, will not the reader smile that I should conjecture the image might originally have been discovered in the following humble verses in a poem once considered not as contemptible: 

A gentle lamb has rhetoric to plead,
And when she sees the butcher’s knife decreed,
Her voice entreats him not to make her bleed. 

                                                      DR. KING’S Mully of Mountown.

This natural and affecting image might certainly have been observed by Pope, without his having perceived it through the less polished lens of the telescope of Dr. King.  It is, however, a similarity, though it may not be an imitation; and is given as an example of that art in composition which can ornament the humblest conception, like the graceful vest thrown over naked and sordid beggary.

I consider the following lines as strictly copied by Thomas Warton: 

                The daring artist

Explored the pangs that rend the royal breast,
Those wounds that lurk beneath the tissued vest. 

          
                                                        T. WARTON on Shakspeare.

Sir Philip Sidney, in his “Defence of Poesie,” has the same image.  He writes, “Tragedy openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue.”

The same appropriation of thought will attach to the following lines of Tickell: 

While the charm’d reader with thy thought complies,
And views thy Rosamond with Henry’s eyes. 
TICKELL to ADDISON.

Evidently from the French Horace: 

En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue;
Tout Paris, pour Chimene, a les yeux de Rodrigue. 
BOILEAU.

Oldham, the satirist, says in his satires upon the Jesuits, that had Cain been of this black fraternity, he had not been content with a quarter of mankind.

    Had he been Jesuit, had he but put on
    Their savage cruelty, the rest had gone!
                                                Satire ii.

Doubtless at that moment echoed in his poetical ear the energetic and caustic epigram of Andrew Marvel, against Blood stealing the crown dressed in a parson’s cassock, and sparing the life of the keeper: 

With the Priest’s vestment had he but put on
The Prelate’s cruelty—­the Crown had gone!

The following passages seem echoes to each other, and it is but justice due to Oldham, the satirist, to acknowledge him as the parent of this antithesis: