Note (return) — Replies.
Reading edition
Your correspondent J. G. T. asks whence comes the expression in the Burial Service, "In the midst of life we are in death?" There are some lines in Petrarch which express precisely the same idea in nearly the self-same words; but as the thought is by no means an unlikely one to occur to two separate and independent authors, we may not go to the length of charging the seeming plagiarism upon the compilers of our Prayer-Book. I have mislaid the exact reference[5], but subjoin the lines themselves: