[8] Precisely, however, the same gesture, plebian as it was, by which the
English commandant at Heligoland replied to the Danes when civilly
inviting him to surrender. Southey it was, on the authority of Lieutenant
Southey, his brother, who communicated to me this anecdote.

[9] "_Bridge of sighs_."--Two men of memorable genius, Hood last, and
Lord Byron by many years previously, have so appropriated this phrase,
and reissued it as English currency, that many readers suppose it to be
theirs. But the genealogies of fine expressions should be more carefully
preserved. The expression belongs originally to Venice. This _jus
postliminii_ becomes of real importance in many cases, but especially in
the case of Shakspeare. Could one have believed it possible beforehand?
And yet it is a fact that he is made to seem a robber of the lowest
order, by mere dint of suffering robbery. Purely through their own
jewelly splendor have many hundreds of his phrases forced themselves into
usage so general, under the vulgar infirmity of seeking to strengthen
weak prose by shreds of poetic quotation, that at length the majority of
careless readers come to look upon these phrases as belonging to the
language, and traceable to no distinct proprietor any more than proverbs:
and thus, on afterwards observing them in Shakspeare, they regard him in
the light of one accepting alms (like so many meaner persons) from the
common treasury of the universal mind, on which treasury, meantime, he
had himself conferred these phrases as original donations of his own.
Many expressions in the "Paradise Lost," in "Il Penseroso," and in
"L'Allegro," are in the same predicament. And thus the almost incredible
case is realized which I have described, viz., that simply by having
suffered a robbery through two centuries, (for the first attempt at
plundering Milton was made upon his juvenile poems,) have Shakspeare and
Milton come to be taxed as robbers. N. B.--In speaking of Hood as having