On Butler who can think without just rage,
The glory and the scandal of the age?
Satire against Poetry.

It seems evidently borrowed by Pope, when he applies the thought to Erasmus:—­

At length Erasmus, that great injured name,
The glory of the priesthood and the shame!

Young remembered the antithesis when he said,

    Of some for glory such the boundless rage,
    That they’re the blackest scandal of the age.

Voltaire, a great reader of Pope, seems to have borrowed part of the expression:—­

    Scandale d’Eglise, et des rois le modele.

De Caux, an old French poet, in one of his moral poems on an hour-glass, inserted in modern collections, has many ingenious thoughts.  That this poem was read and admired by Goldsmith, the following beautiful image seems to indicate.  De Caux, comparing the world to his hour-glass, says beautifully,

                         C’est un verre qui luit,
    Qu’un souffle peut detruire, et qu’un souffle a produit.

Goldsmith applies the thought very happily—­

    Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
    A breath can make them, as a breath has made.

I do not know whether we might not read, for modern copies are sometimes incorrect,

    A breath unmakes them, as a breath has made.

Thomson, in his pastoral story of Palemon and Lavinia, appears to have copied a passage from Otway.  Palemon thus addresses Lavinia:—­

Oh, let me now into a richer soil Transplant thee safe, where vernal suns and showers Diffuse their warmest, largest influence; And of my garden be the pride and joy!

Chamont employs the same image when speaking of Monimia; he says—­

You took her up a little tender flower, ——­ and with a careful loving hand Transplanted her into your own fair garden, Where the sun always shines.

The origin of the following imagery is undoubtedly Grecian; but it is still embellished and modified by our best poets:—­

                  ——­While universal Pan,
    Knit with the graces and the hours, in dance
    Led on th’ eternal spring.
                                   Paradise Lost.

Thomson probably caught this strain of imagery: 

                Sudden to heaven

Thence weary vision turns, where leading soft
The silent hours of love, with purest ray
Sweet Venus shines.

          
                                            Summer, v. 1692.

Gray, in repeating this imagery, has borrowed a remarkable epithet from Milton: 

Lo, where the rosy-bosom’d hours,
Fair Venus’ train, appear.
Ode to Spring.