"_A Posie of other Men's Flowers_" (Vol. iv., p. 211.).--Your correspondent MR. C. FORBES appears anxious to know where Montaigne speaks of "a posie of other men's flowers." I believe that there is an error in confining Montaigne's idea thus exclusively to poetry, for I presume the passage sought for is what I shall now quote; but if so, it applies generally to any borrowed thought from an author embellished by another:
"La vérité et la raison sont communes à un chascun, et ne sont plus à celui qui les adictes premièrement, qu'à qui les dict aprez: ce n'est non plus selon Platon que selon moy, puisque luy et moy l'entendons, et veoyons de mesme. _Les abeilles pillotent deça delà les fleurs; mais elles en font aprez le miel, qui est tout leur; ce n'est plus thym, ny mariolaine_; ainsi les pièces empruntées d'aultruy, il les transformera et confondra pour en faire un ouvrage tout sien, à scavoir son jugement," &c.--_Essays_, livre i. chap. 25.
I hope that this will satisfactorily answer your correspondent's inquiry.
_Voltaire_ (Vol. iii. p. 433.).--On the subject of _anagrams_, lately adverted to by your correspondents, I not long since referred to that which showed that the name of _Voltaire_, as adduced by me in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ a few years back, instead of being, as asserted by Lord Brougham and others, that of an estate, was in fact the anagram of his family patronymic, with the adjunct of l. j., or junior (le jeune), to distinguish him from his elder brother. We see similarly the President of the French National Assembly uniformly called "Dupin l'aîné"; and his brother Charles, until created a Baron, always "Dupin le jeune." Observing, therefore, that Voltaire was in reality Arouet le jeune, or, as he signed it, Arouet l. j., and that the two letters u and j were, until distinguished by the Elzevir, indiscriminately written v and i, the anagram will thus be clearly proved: every letter, though transposed, being equally in both:--
Although, as above mentioned, this unquestionable fact has already appeared in another publication, and, indeed, likewise in the _Dublin Review_ for June 1845 (both from me), yet the old mis-statement of this celebrated personage's biographers still continued to be asserted, as it has been in your own pages. This is my motive for now addressing you on the matter. Voltaire, I may add, was a little partial to his paternal name. To the Abbé Moussinot, his Parisian agent, he thus wrote on the 17th of May, 1741: