known. Though May spoke but little, her voice was sweet and musical, and what she said showed her sense and judgment.

After luncheon, Miss Jane invited Lady Castleton and Julia to walk through the grounds and to see their grotto.

"And is this all your doing, Harry?" asked his mother, after they had admired the grotto and its surrounding rockwork, with the clear pool of water shaded by lofty wide-spreading trees.

"Only partly; I did not originate the designs; to that young lady is due all the credit which they deserve," he answered, looking at May; "I have inerely acted as a workman under her superintendence."

"I must not allow the merit they possess to be given to me; Mr. Castleton suggested and executed

Harry replied that now his mother and sister had seen May they could not fail to love her. "Of that I have no doubt," whispered Miss Mary, pressing May's hand.

Miss Jane was less sanguine. Still they would be happy to see Harry until Sir Ralph prohibited his coming.

Harry left May to get a few words of prudent counsel from the good ladies, but soon returned to say good-by! Refusing to see any clouds in the horizon, he rode home rejoicing that he had won Maiden May.

PLAGIARISM.

that the ladies had not brought their guests to see the grotto at all.

Lady Castleton was evidently more than ever puzzled. Knowing the world, she was now very certain that this fair stranger was her son's chief attraction to Downside, and determined to crossquestion him on the first opportunity.

They returned to the house, where, after sitting a few minutes, Lady Castleton begged that her carriage might be ordered. As Harry handed his mother into it, she said, quietly :

"I am not surprised that you take so much interest in grotto-building. You will follow us soon, I hope?"

"Oh yes," answered Harry, and he told the coachman to drive on. We shall have time for a little more work," he said, entering the hall, where Miss Jane stood watching her departing guests.

May resumed her hat, and accompanied him to the grotto. "I feel as if I was acting the hypocrite to my kind friends; I ought to tell them, Harry, and not allow you to come here under false pretences." "They cannot object to my coming, even though you are the attraction. We will tell them at once."

May and Harry, as may be supposed, did very little work; they would probably have been less successful than usual had they attempted it. At length his watch told him that it was nearly time to return to Texford. They went into the house and found the ladies in the drawing-room. May sat down next to Miss Mary and took her hand.

"I ought to lose no time in telling you what has occurred," she said, trying to maintain her calmness; "Mr. Castleton has asked me to marry him.”

"My dear!" exclaimed the two Miss Pembertons in different keys, Miss Jane fixing her eyes on Harry.

"What have you said in reply?" asked Miss Mary.

"Do you suppose that I could refuse him ?" "I see, my dear, that you have not," observed Miss Jane, judging from his countenance. We love you both, and I am sure no two young people could be better suited to each other; but when we invited Harry here we did not dream of such a result. Have you both considered well the consequences?"

Yes, Harry declared that he had thought them over seriously. At all events, Cousin Jane, you and Cousin Mary will not object to my coming here?"

"You know we cannot welcome you, should your father and mother not approve of your intentions."

not so easy to define wherein consists the offence. In the republic of letters may not a good thing once uttered be considered the property of all? At the feast of reason and the flow of soul, who is to blame for helping himself first? Stealing, we know, is an ugly word. "The wise do call it convey,' as Shakespeare tells us. Now in this view of conveyancing mind, we should be glad of a few simple rules as to what is and what is not a legitimate process. Perhaps the best definition of a plagiarism is that of Sir Fretful Plagiary in Sheridan's play of the "Critic," where he tells Sneer that "authors serve your best thoughts as gipsies do stolen children, they disfigure them to make them pass as their own. Sheridan probably only meant a witticism, but he has thrown off a short and easy mode of testing a plagiarism-a better definition, in fact, than the dictionary one of Cotgrave and Johnson. Every one knows that it is a metaphor from the Roman plagiarius, or man-stealer. If killing a book is worse, according to Milton, than killing its author, so it was an easy transition from stealing a man to speak of stealing his brains. In one of Martial's epigrams the literary thief is described as a plagiarius. He is one who borrows what he never means to return, and steals with intention of passing off the thoughts of another as his own. It is the intention of the fraud which constitutes the theft. Archbishop Whately, who drew largely from the treasure-house of other congenial minds, said of himself, "I may be a robber, but I could not commit a theft." It was one of his amiable foibles to play the plagiarist; but having formed a school of his own, and trained up a number of minds to think as he did, he was in reality only reclaiming his own. According to the old distinction between grand and petty larceny, since abolished, we should say that plagiarism is petty larceny, the dishonest appropriation of another man's thoughts, and passing them off as our own. the furtive appropriation that the offence lies. Milton hit the mark when he pointed out, much as Whately did, the distinction between borrowing and filching the thoughts of another. "Such kind of borrowing as this," he adds, "if it be not bettered by the borrower among good authors, is accounted plagiary."

It is in

We have sometimes thought of establishing a kind of Scotland Yard for the restoration of stolen literary wares. It is surprising how many borrowed plumes would find their way back, and how bare some authors would be if all their plagiarisms, conscious and unconscious, had to be accounted for. Coleridge was a large borrower from Schelling and Kant. Whole pages of the wondrous "Table Talk,"

66

"You

This is a serious charge, and in the case of any one else but Coleridge reprehensible in the highest degree; but in plagiarising he was not consciously a thief. An anecdote of his schoolboy days illustrates his habit of mind. One day, when turned out on one of those long holidays at Christ's Hospital which he spent so drearily in wandering through the streets, in a fit of abstraction he pushed his hands forward in such a way that they touched the flap of a gentleman's coat. young rascal, so I have caught you picking my pocket," the gentleman exclaimed, seizing the boy by the collar, and proceeding to deal with him as a thief. The boy looked up innocently in his captor's face, and protested his innocence-he was Leander swimming the Hellespont to visit his Hero, and here he suited the action to the word. The gentleman was amused with the simplicity of the young Blue walking the streets of London as if it were the Hellespont, befriended the boy, made him free of his library, and in many other ways took an interest in him. This trait of Coleridge's boyhood goes a long way to explain and excuse his defective sense of the difference between borrowing without and with acknowledgment. He helped himself to the thoughts of others without scruple, but he also gave away, it must be added, in the same open-handed, generous way. He was, it must be admitted, a plagiarist, but he could plead the excuse of the Yankee who was charged with walking off with another man's umbrella-that he bought a new one once a year, put it into circulation, and then considered himself free of the umbrella-stands of his friends for the rest of the twelvemonth.

But of all plagiarists some of the most barefaced have been those of the pulpit. The story is told of Dr. South travelling in the north of England, where he dropped into a country church one Sunday morning. In coming from the church the rector suspected him to be a brother in the ministry, and spoke to him. He received the rector's courtesies, and thanked him for the very edifying sermon he had preached, suggesting that it must have been the result of a

"Oh no," said the rector; we turn off these things rapidly. On Friday afternoon and Saturday morning I prepared this discourse." "Is that possible?" said Dr. South; "it took me three weeks to write that very sermon.' "Your name is not Dr. South?" said the rector, beginning to look foolish. 'It is, sir," said Dr. South. "Then," said the rector, "I have only to say that I am not ashamed to preach Dr. South's sermons anywhere.' The coolness of the reply is inimitable. But the plagiarist is not always so fortunate as to escape on such easy terms as these. A few years ago an anecdote went the round of the press in connection with the late Bishop of Tuam. He delivered a charge which was so much admired that he was pressed by the late Mr. Dallas, and others who heard it, to send it to press. He consented. The charge was published, and so fell into the hands of the late Archbishop Sumner. Great was the archbishop's surprise to find that a charge which he had delivered to the clergy of Canterbury had been appropriated without acknowledgment, when it came out that the Bishop of Tuam had commissioned his private chaplain to prepare a charge. The chaplain had laid hands on one of Archbishop Sumner's charges, and passed it off as his own composition, and so there was a double plagiarism. The unfortunate bishop was reminded by the press that Tuam had forgotten the distinction between meum and tuum. The "plagiary priest," as Bishop Hall describes one in his own day, is a character only too common down to the present day. The epigram on the parson who lost his portmanteau containing his entire stock of sermons is well known :—

"They stole my portmanteau-I pity your grief,

They contained all my sermons-I pity the thief." The late Chauncy Townsend, who, if a pulpit plagiarist, had the wit to acknowledge it and join in the ery of "stop thief," has dressed the same epigram up in these lines:

May safely give them back again-for they were stolen before."

"The thief who stole my sermons, on which I set such store,

Recepit non rapuit was the motto of William of Orange on taking the crown of England. "But the receiver is as bad as the thief," was Swift's witty comment on this questionable motto. The plagiarist is

sometimes a thief, but more often only the receiver of stolen goods. The sermon market would furnish a chapter by itself for a writer on plagiarisms. It is not the appropriation of the best thoughts of another, but the furtive uttering of them as our own, that constitutes the offence of the pulpit plagiarist. A preacher is at liberty, of course, to repeat himself as much as he likes. Indeed, he may plead Archbishop Whately's excuse for doing this: "I could not give the people any better, and I certainly would not give them worse." He may go further, and take up the best sermons of our great preachers, so long as he does not attempt to pass them off as his own; but here we must draw the line.

An anecdote is current as to an English squire, apparently of the Sir Roger de Coverley stamp, who, on being invited to meet Dr. Guthrie, said he would be delighted, for "his son always preached the doctor's sermons"! In confirmation of which I may quote, from interesting personal fecollections of Dr. Guthrie in the "Sunday at Home" (January, 1874), what is said about "stealing" his sermons.

"The

doctor told two stories in connection with one of his published sermons, which I will give as nearly as I can in his own words: Some years ago I was advertised to preach for Dr. Cooke, of Belfast, on a particular Sabbath. Before I left home I received a letter from an Irish minister, asking me, as a great favour, that I would not take for my text on that occasion, "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock;" and then he went on to say, "I'm ashamed to give you my reason for this; but, being in Edinburgh one day, I heard you preach from that text. On my return home I was very much pressed for time, and I thought I might use your discourse, with as much of your language as I could remember; and it succeeded so well, and was so highly prized by my people, that I gave it in Dr. Cooke's church, with similar results." But this was not all; for the letter went on to say, "And I have yet another favour to ask of you, my dear sir-that you will not preach from another text (naming it), and I will give you my reasons for making this further request: One day, when I was again late in preparation for my pulpit, a student came in to see me, to whom I told how I was circumstanced. 'Oh,' says he, 'I was in Edinburgh last Sunday, and heard Guthrie preach. I took notes of the sermon. Will they be of any use to you?' Well, sir, I took them and preached them, and again, as in the other case, repeated them to Dr. Cooke's congregation." Of course,' said the doctor, 'I took a different text from either of these two; and after sermon a gentleman came up and, grasping my hand, said kindly, "Thank you, sir, for obliging me, and keeping off the two texts as I requested." "Ah," says I, "my good friend, is this you? Well, it was very easy for me to oblige you." But I have still another story to tell you about that very text: There was a vacant charge in one of our country districts, to which probationers were appointed to preach as candidates. Well, sir, the first came and gave out that text, and preached from it in as many of my words as he could remember. The next Sabbath the second did the same; but the third Sabbath the elders had got wisdom, so they asked the preacher if he would kindly tell them his text. "With the greatest pleasure, gentlemen," he answered; "it is, Behold, I stand at the door, and knock." "Well, then," said the elders, "as we have heard that sermon these two last Sundays, you will perhaps oblige us by something fresh."""

he says, 66 as is abundantly clear, does our English poet make any pretence of concealing these obligations, but adopts all, even to the very work of Sir Thomas North, with only such transposition and slight alteration as may be necessary to give to them a rhythmical cadence and flow. He is too rich, and too conscious that he is rich, to fear the charge of endeavouring to pass himself off for such by the laying of his hands upon the riches of others. And here, indeed," the archbishop adds, "is what properly determines whether an author should be adjudged by us as a plagiarist or not. The question is not what he appropriates, but what proportion these appropriations bear to that which he has of his own; whether if these were withdrawn and resumed by their rightful owners they would leave him poor. If such would be the result, then, however few and small these may have been, we can count him no better than a daw passing himself off for a peacock by the aid of feathers stuck into his plumage, and not properly his own. If, on the other hand, all revindication by others of what is theirs would leave him essentially as rich as he was before, his position in the world of poetry is not affected by the bringing home to him any number of these appropriations."

We need not enter further into the ethics of plagiarism. It is not simply appropriation, but that it is done with intent to deceive, which brings a writer under the charge of bad faith. We do not speak here of barefaced and impudent forgeries, like the pretended decretals of the early Popes. Everyone now knows that they were forged by Isidore of Seville, and passed undetected through the Middle Ages and down to the revival of learning. So again that pretended donation of Constantine which deceived even Dante, Ghibelline though he was, and which seemed to him to make the Pope's pretensions to the patrimony of Peter stronger than they really were. Nor do we refer to the parodies of Swift and Defoe, which were so clever as to defy detection. Swift's imitation of Boyle in his "Meditations on a Broomstick," passed off as genuine on Lady Temple, and read by her, to the great edification of her household, at family prayers. So, again, Defoe's "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters was applauded to the echo by the Tory parsons and squires of that day, till the deception was found out, when their rage knew no bounds, going the length of putting the author into the pillory with the libel tied round his neck. A parody differs from a plagiarism as much as a caricature from a tame and spiritless copy. It is when the copy is passed off for an original that we feel bound to complain of plagiarism.

was

Archbishop Trench criticises the extent to which Shakespeare was indebted to Plutarch. "Nowhere,"

and he entered Waterloo with raw troops and discomfited allies." Mr. Disraeli then went on to describe the qualities of a great general. He had to think of the march to-day and the battle to-morrow, he had to prepare for an advance and to provide for a retreat, to be equal to a victory and not to be overwhelmed by a disaster.

Unfortunately for Mr. Disraeli's reputation for originality, the "Globe" newspaper, a day or two after the delivery of this speech, drew attention to the fact that one passage of noticeable neatness had been taken almost verbatim from a speech delivered by M. Thiers in 1829 as an éloge at the funeral of Marshal Gouvion de St. Cyr. The explanation possibly is that the passage had been extracted by Mr. Disraeli, and the source forgotten.

But among the least known of these plagiarisms, the composition of the national anthem," God save the Queen," deserves to be mentioned. The ring of it is certainly not English. "Send her victorioushappy and glorious," is an obvious Gallicism, which might have awakened suspicion as to its real origin. The facts are, we believe, as follows. The author was Henry Carey, a true son of the Muses, whose misfortunes form a chapter of the elder Disraeli's Calamities of Authors." In early life he successfully burlesqued the affected versification of Ambrose Philips, in his baby poems, to which he gave the happy name of " Namby Pamby," and thus coined a new epithet in the language. Carey's "Namby Pamby" was at first considered by Swift as the satirical effusion of Pope, who returned the compliment by attributing it to Swift. His ballad of Sally in our Alley was more than once commended by Addison for its nature, and is sung to this day. But it is to the National Anthem that his best claim belongs to be remembered, only unfortunately for his fame it has been found out that it is little else than a barefaced plagiarism from the French. In the "Memoirs of the Marquise de Crequy," published in 1844, and containing her souvenirs from 1710 to 1800, the original words are given in French, as sung before Louis XIV when he entered the Chapel of St. Cyr. The words are as follows:

"Grand Dieu, sauvez le Roi! Grand Dieu, voyez le Roi ! Vive le Roi!

Qui toujours glorieux,
Louis victorieux.

"Voyez vos ennemis,

Toujours soumis.

Grand Dieu, sauvez le Roi !
Grand Dieu, voyez le Roi!
Vive le Roi !"

The words are said to have been written by Madame de Brinon, and the music by the famous Sully. The plagiarism here is apparent; either the French borrowed from the English or the English from the French, and the latter is the only possible supposition of the two. As Wordsworth says of MacPherson, the reputed translator of " Ossian, and a notorious plagiarist, "All hail MacPherson, hail to the sire of Ossian! the phantom was begotten by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition; it travelled southward, where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin consistence took its course through Europe upon the

breath of popular applause. As the translators of the Bible, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Pope could not be indebted to MacPherson, it follows that he must owe his fine feathers to them.". The fate of MacPherson's Ossian should be a warning to plagiarists. He was a daw in peacock's plumes, and strutted about for the admiration of a whole generation of critics. Blair, the oracle of his day in Edinburgh, pronounced it to be an elegant and masterly translation of a lost original, and claimed for this bold imposture that we may assign it a place among those works of genius which are to last for ages. "I read Ossian," said Dr. Parr, "when a boy, and was crammed with it. When at college I again read Ossian with increased delight. although convinced of the imposture, find pleasure in reading MacPherson." It was one of the few books which the great Napoleon took with him on his campaigns as his travelling companion; indeed, it is a singular though by no means solitary instance of that mushroom kind of fame which the spurious work of a plagiarist attains to. It springs up like Jonah's gourd and withers as soon. As soon as the imitation is detected it has lost its charm; we are disgusted with the trick which has been imposed on us.

I now,

The last place we should look for a plagiarism is on a tombstone. Though to lie like an epitaph is as proverbial as to "lie like a gazette," this arises from the praise being false, not because it is filched from another man's tomb. Yet no less a person than Benjamin Franklin was guilty of this mistake. According to Mrs. Piozzi: "The curious epitaph made on himself, and as we long believed by himself, was borrowed without acknowledgment from one upon Jacob Tonson, to whom it was more appropriate." He compared himself to "an old book eaten by worms, which on some future day should, however, be new edited after undergoing revisal and correction from the author.”

To plagiarise an epitaph is like snatching a body, it is an offence against the dead, and one, moreover, for which we cannot pursue and punish the offender. There is no hue and cry among the tombs, no "stop thief" to the defaulter who has put death between us and him. All we can do is to punish him in the way to which he would be most sensitive. He has sought posthumous fame; we can deny him that. We can adopt the same course which Napoleon resorted to to check suicide in the army in Egypt, by declaring the suicide infamous, and thus touching French honour on the sorest point.

We have said enough on plagiarisms. This offence is the reverse of that of the old monks. They made palimpsests of the classics, using up old parchments of the classics to write their wordy chronicles on, but they were not plagiarists. Theirs was a barbarism like that of the Turks at Athens, defacing monuments whose worth they did not know. They would have been surprised at the ingenuity of the Jesuit Hardouin, who pretended that the monks were the authors of the classics because they used the same parchments. They at least made no such claim, and the paradox was no sooner started than it was instantly scouted by all. The plagiarist is the pickpocket of literature, and when detected it is the duty of all honest writers to punish him, even as schoolboys who are caught "cribbing," by making him copy out 500 lines of the writer he has filched from.