Howell has prefixed to his Letters a tedious poem, written in the taste of the times, and he there says of _letters_, that they are The heralds and sweet harbingers that move From _East to West, on embassies of love_; They can the _tropic cut_, and _cross the line_. It is probable that Pope had noted this thought, for the following lines seem a beautiful heightening of the idea: Heaven first taught _letters_, for some wretch's aid, Some banish'd _lover_, or some captive maid. Then he adds, they _Speed the soft intercourse_ from soul to soul, And waft a sigh from _Indus_ to the _Pole_. _Eloisa_. There is another passage in "Howell's Letters," which has a great affinity with a thought of Pope, who, in "the Rape of the Lock," says, Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare, And _beauty draws us with a single hair_. Howell writes, p. 290, "'Tis a powerful sex:--they were too strong for the first, the strongest and wisest man that was; they must needs be strong, when _one hair of a woman can draw more than an hundred pair of oxen_." Pope's description of the death of the lamb, in his "Essay on Man," is finished with the nicest touches, and is one of the finest pictures our poetry exhibits. Even familiar as it is to our ear, we never examine it but with undiminished admiration. The _lamb_, thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood. After pausing on the last two fine verses, will not the reader smile that I should conjecture the image might originally have been discovered in the following humble verses in a poem once considered not as contemptible: A gentle _lamb_ has rhetoric to plead, And when she sees the butcher's knife decreed, Her voice entreats him not to make her bleed. DR. KING'S _Mully of Mountown_. This natural and affecting image might certainly have been observed by Pope, without his having perceived it through the less polished lens of the telescope of Dr. King. It is, however, a _similarity_, though it may not be an _imitation_; and is given as an example of that art in composition which can ornament the humblest conception, like the graceful vest thrown over naked and sordid beggary. I consider the following lines as strictly copied by Thomas Warton: The daring artist Explored the pangs that rend the royal breast, _Those wounds that lurk beneath the tissued vest_. T. WARTON on Shakspeare. Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Defence of Poesie," has the same image. He writes, "Tragedy openeth the greatest _wounds_, and showeth forth the _ulcers_ that are _covered with tissue_." The same appropriation of thought will attach to the following lines of Tickell: