Long as I have detained the reader, I take leave to add a few words on the subject of imitation, or, more plainly speaking, borrowing. In the course of a long Poem, and more especially of two long ones, it is very difficult to avoid a recurrence of the same thoughts, and of similar expressions; and, however careful I have been myself in detecting and removing these kinds of repetitions, my readers, I question not, would, if disposed to seek them, find many remaining. For these I can only plead that common excuse--they are the offences of a bad memory, and not of voluntary inattention; to which I must add the difficulty (I have already mentioned) of avoiding the error. This kind of plagiarism will therefore, I conceive, be treated with lenity; and of the more criminal kind, borrowing from others, I plead, with much confidence, "not guilty." But while I claim exemption from guilt, I do not affirm that much of sentiment and much of expression may not be detected in the vast collection of English poetry: it is sufficient for an author, that he uses not the words or ideas of another without acknowledgment; and this, and no more than this, I mean, by disclaiming debts of the kind. Yet resemblances are sometimes so very striking, that it requires faith in a reader to admit they were undesigned. A line in the second Letter, "And monuments themselves memorials need," was written long before the author, in an accidental recourse to Juvenal, read-- "Quandoquidem data sunt ipsis quoque fata sepulchris." Sat. x. l. 146. and for this I believe the reader will readily give me credit. But there is another apparent imitation in the life of _Blaney_ (Letter xiv), a simile of so particular a kind, that its occurrence to two writers at the same time must appear as an extraordinary event. For this reason I once determined to exclude it from the relation, but, as it was truly unborrowed, and suited the place in which it stood, this seemed, on after-consideration, to be an act of cowardice, and the lines are therefore printed as they were written about two months before the very same thought (prosaically drest) appeared in a periodical work of the last summer. It is highly probable, in these cases, that both may derive the idea from a forgotten but common source; and in this way I must entreat the reader to do me justice, by accounting for other such resemblances, should any be detected.