Lord Lyttleton acknowledged the authorship of two dialogues, in the first of which the personages were the Savior and Socrates, in the second king David and Cæsar Borgia. * * * * * Dante gives the name of _sonnet_ to his little canzone or ode beginning O voi che per la via d'Amor passate. * * * * * Boileau is mistaken in saying that Petrarch ‘qui est regardé comme le pere du sonnet’ borrowed it from the French or Provençal writers. The Italian sonnet can be traced back as far as the year 1200. Petrarch was not born until 1304. * * * * * The learned Menage has this epitaph on Sannazarius Ci git, dont l'esprit fût si beau, Sannazar, ce poete habile, Qui par ses vers divins approche de Virgile, Plus encore que par son tombeau. * * * * * The two reprehensible lines in Pope's Eloisa, Not Cæsar's empress would I deign to prove; No—make me mistress to the man I love are to be found in the original letters of Eloisa—at least the thought. * * * * * Mercier, in “L'an deux mille quatre cents quarante” seriously maintains the doctrines of the Metempsychosis, and J. D'Israeli says there is no system so simple, and so little repugnant to the understanding. * * * * * One of the best epigrams affixed to the statue of Pasquin was the following upon Paul III, Ut canerent data multa olim sunt vatibus æra Ut taceam quantum tu mihi, Paule, dabis? * * * * * Milton in Paradise Lost, has this passage, ——when the _scourge_ Inexorably, and the _torturing hour_ Call us to penance. Gray, in his Ode to Adversity, has Thou tamer of the human breast Whose iron _scourge_, and _torturing hour_ The bad affright. * * * * * Gray tells us that the image of his bard, where Loose his beard, and hoary hair Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air was taken from a picture by Raphael: yet the beard of Hudibras is also likened to a meteor, This hairy meteor did denounce The fall of sceptres and of crowns. * * * * * The lines For he that fights and runs away May live to fight another day, But he that is in battle slain Will never rise to fight again are not to be found, as is thought, in Hudibras. Butler's verses ran thus; For he that flies may fight again Which he can never do that's slain. The former are in a volume of ‘Poems’ by Sir John Mennes, reign of Charles II. The original idea is in Demosthenes. Ανερ ο φεογων και παλιν μαχησεται. * * * * * “Semel insanivimus omnes” is not from Horace but from Mantuanus, an Italian. In a work entitled “De honesto amore” is this line, Id commune malum, semel insanivimus omnes. * * * * *