Dryden, alluding to his work: "When it was only a confused mass of thoughts _tumbling_ over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its _first work_, moving the _sleeping images of things_ towards the light, there to be distinguished, and there either to be _chosen_ or rejected by the _judgment_."--Dedication to the _Rival Ladies_. Lord Byron's appropriation of the same idea: ---- "As yet 'tis but a chaos Of darkly brooding thoughts: my fancy is In her _first work_, more nearly to the light Holding the sleeping images of things For the selection of the pausing judgment." _Doge of Venice._ Had Oldham or Dryden the prior claim to the thought? Byron derived _his_ plagiarism from D'Israeli, "On the Literary Character" (vol. i. p. 284., 1828), where Dryden's Dedication to his _Rival Ladies_ is quoted, and _not_ from the Dedication itself, as the _Retrospective Review_ imagined (vol. vii. p. 158.), "by levying contributions in the most secret and lonely recesses of our literature." JAMES CORNISH. THE "EISELL" CONTROVERSY. When Polonius proposed to use the players according to their desert, Hamlet rebuked him with "Much better man! use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity!" I do not think it necessary to notice that what is merely coarse and vulgar in an unprovoked attack upon myself, feeling that I have no right to expect the man who has no consideration for his own dignity to think of mine. But when an attempt is made to sow dissension between me and those whose opinions I value, and whose characters I esteem, I feel that in justice to myself and in satisfaction to them, a few words are not out of place. Some few of your readers may have seen a pamphlet in reply to MR. SINGER, on the meaning of _eisell_ and from certain insinuations about "pegs and wires," and a "literary coterie," it might be supposed that there existed some other bond for the support of "NOTES AND QUERIES" than a common object affords. I wish then to inform such of them as may not happen to belong to the "coterie" in question (which I suppose exists somewhere--perhaps holds a sort of witch's-sabbath on some inaccessible peak in the pamphleteer's imagination), that I have never, to my knowledge, even seen either MR. SINGER or the editor of "NOTES AND QUERIES;" and that, so far from meaning offence to the angry gentleman who seems disposed to run-a-muck against all who come in his way, I actually supposed all meant in good part, and characterised his remarks as "pleasant criticism."