“You can also state them more freely to a third person, as between
     you and me they could only produce some smart postscripts, which
     would not adorn our mutual archives.

     “I am sorry for the Queen, and that’s more than you are.”

[Footnote 46:  One of the charges of plagiarism brought against him by some scribblers of the day was founded (as I have already observed in the first volume of this work) on his having sought in the authentic records of real shipwrecks those materials out of which he has worked his own powerful description in the second Canto of Don Juan.  With as much justice might the Italian author, (Galeani, if I recollect right,) who wrote a Discourse on the Military Science displayed by Tasso in his battles, have reproached that poet with the sources from which he drew his knowledge:—­with as much justice might Puysegur and Segrais, who have pointed out the same merit in Homer and Virgil, have withheld their praise because the science on which this merit was founded must have been derived by the skill and industry of these poets from others.

So little was Tasso ashamed of those casual imitations of other poets which are so often branded as plagiarisms, that, in his Commentary on his Rime, he takes pains to point out and avow whatever coincidences of this kind occur in his own verses.

While on this subject, I may be allowed to mention one single instance, where a thought that had lain perhaps indistinctly in Byron’s memory since his youth, comes out so improved and brightened as to be, by every right of genius, his own.  In the Two Noble Kinsmen of Beaumont and Fletcher (a play to which the picture of passionate friendship, delineated in the characters of Palamon and Arcite, would be sure to draw the attention of Byron in his boyhood,) we find the following passage:—­

           “Oh never
    Shall we two exercise, like twins of Honour,
    Our arms again, and feel our fiery horses
    Like proud seas under us.”

Out of this somewhat forced simile, by a judicious transposition of the comparison, and by the substitution of the more definite word “waves” for “seas” the clear, noble thought in one of the Cantos of Childe Harold has been produced:—­

“Once more upon the waters! yet once more! 
And the waves bound beneath me, as a steed
That knows his rider.”]

[Footnote 47:  “No man ever rose (says Pope) to any degree of perfection in writing but through obstinacy and an inveterate resolution against the stream of mankind.”]

* * * * *

LETTER 446.  TO MR. MOORE.

     “Ravenna, August 24. 1821.