The stretching forth of the child's hands he found in Pindar and Cowley; his "smiling" in Cowley alone, for there is no trace of it in the original. While speaking of Gray, one scarcely likes alluding to that great _whetstone_, Dr. Johnson; for certainly the darkest shade on his well-merited literary reputation arises from his unjust, ill-natured, and unscholarlike criticisms upon a poet whose sole transgression was to have been his cotemporary. But Johnson eulogises Shakspeare, as did Gray, and I cannot help thinking that he, as well as Gray, was indebted to Cowley: _e.g._ Johnson writes: "When Learning's triumph o'er her barb'rous foes First rear'd the stage, immortal Shakspeare rose; Each change of many-colour'd life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new: Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign, _And panting Time toil'd after him in vain_." _Prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick at the opening of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1747._ "He did the utmost bounds of knowledge find; He found them not so large as was his mind, But, like the large Pellaean youth, did mone Because that art had no more worlds than one. And when he saw that he through all had past, He dy'd, lest he should idle grow at last." Cowley, _On the Death of Sir Henry Wooton_, page 6.: Lond. 1668, fol. And with Dr. Johnson's sixth line-- "Panting Time toil'd after him in vain," we may, I think, compare Cowley's description of King David's earlier years: "Bless me! how swift and growing was his wit! _The wings of Time flag'd dully after it_." _Davideis_, lib. iii. p. 92. But to return to Gray, Ode VI. "The Bard:" "With haggard eyes the poet stood, Loose his beard, and hoary hair _Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air_." Wakefield quotes _Paradise Lost_, lib. i. 535.: "The imperial ensign, which full high advanc'd, Shone _like a meteor streaming to the wind_." Campbell, in _The Pleasures of Hope_, Part I., _does_ borrow from Milton in the above passage: "Where Andes, giant of the western star, With _meteor standard to the winds unfurl'd_;" but Gray is alluding to _hair_, and not to a standard; to the original derivation of the word _comet_ (κόμη), and possibly to a different passage in Milton, viz. _Par. Lost_, ii. 706.: "on the other side, Incens'd with indignation, Satan stood Unterrified: and like a _comet_ burned, That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge, In the arctic sky, and from his horrid _hair_ Shakes pestilence and war." Or as Virgil before him, _Æneid_, lib. x. 270.: "_Ardet apex capiti, cristisque a vertici flamma_ Funditur, et vastos umbo vomit aureus ignes: Non secus, ac liquida si quando nocti _cometæ_ Sanguinei lugubre rubent, aut Sirius ardor," &c.