Note 2 — A SKETCH OF MY CHILDHOOD.

"Bridge of sighs:"—Two men of memorable genius, Hood last, and Lord Byron by many years previously, have so appropriated this phrase, and re-issued it as English currency, that many readers suppose it to be theirs. But the genealogies of fine expressions should be more carefully preserved. The expression belongs originally to Venice. This jus postliminii becomes of real importance in a case like that of Shakspeare. It is a most remarkable fact that he is made to seem a robber of the lowest order by mere dint of suffering robbery. Purely through their own jewelly splendor, have many hundreds of his phrases forced themselves into usage so general, under the vulgar infirmity of seeking to strengthen weak prose by shreds of poetic quotation, that at length the majority of careless readers came to look upon these phrases as belonging to the language, and traceable to no distinct proprietor any more than proverbs: and thus, on afterward observing them in Shakspeare, they regard him in the light of one accepting alms (like so many meaner persons) from the common treasury of the universal mind, on which treasury he had himself conferred them as original donations of his own. Many expressions in the "Paradise Lost," in "Il Penseroso," and in "L'Allegro," are in the same predicament: from glorifying their author, so long as they were consciously referred to him as their author, they have, at least, ended in tarnishing his glory. As creations, they were marks of power; as tributes levied upon a common stock, they become arguments of weakness.