Note 107 — LORD BYRON: (continued 5)

Among the imputed plagiarisms so industriously hunted out in his writings, this line has been, with somewhat more plausibility than is frequent in such charges, included,—the lyric poet Lovelace having, it seems, written,

Sir Thomas Brown, too, in his Religio Medici, says—"There is music even in beauty," &c. The coincidence, no doubt, is worth observing, and the task of "tracking" thus a favourite writer "in the snow (as Dryden expresses it) of others" is sometimes not unamusing; but to those who found upon such resemblances a general charge of plagiarism, we may apply what Sir Walter Scott says, in that most agreeable work, his Lives of the Novelists:—"It is a favourite theme of laborious dulness to trace such coincidences, because they appear to reduce genius of the higher order to the usual standard of humanity, and of course to bring the author nearer to a level with his critics."