Again, we have the lines in the "Miller's

Daughter:"

"And dews that would have fallen in tears

I kiss'd away before they fell;"

which have been taken from "Paradise Lost :".

"Two other precious drops that ready stood,

Each in their crystal sluice, he, ere they fell,

Kiss'd."

To these may be added the pretty line in the "Two Voices:"

"You scarce could see the grass for flowers;"

for which Tennyson is indebted to the dramatist George Peele :

"Ye may no see, for peeping flowers, the grasse."

I shall conclude these notices with some samples from Robert Montgomery, for the discovery of which we are indebted to Macaulay. I give them in that writer's words :

“We never fell in with any plunderer who so little understood how to turn his booty to good account as Mr. Montgomery. Lord Byron, in a passage which everybody knows by heart, has said, addressing the sea,

'Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow.'

Mr. Robert Montgomery very coolly appropriates the image, and reproduces the stolen goods in the following form:

'And thou vast ocean, on whose awful face

Time's iron feet can print no ruin-trace.'

A few more lines bring us to another instance of unprofitable

theft. Sir Walter Scott has these lines in the Lord of the

Isles:'

'The dew that on the violet lies

Mocks the dark lustre of thine eyes.'

Now for Mr. Montgomery :

' And the bright dew-bead on the bramble lies,
Like liquid rapture upon beauty's eyes.'

To these examples Macaulay adds the couplet in the "Omnipresence of the Deity," which I have already quoted in speaking of the poet Campbell.

From the preceding remarks the reader will perceive that some of the best thoughts in our modern poets, and some of the most admired passages in their works, turn out, after all, to be little better than plagiarisms. It is in our prose writings, however, that the system is practised with the least scrupulosity. In some instances recourse is had to a slight change in the language, in order to disguise the theft; but, in general, all attempts at palliation are repudiated, and the writer proceeds, with the coolest effrontery, to appropriate not only the thoughts but the very words of the original. To furnish examples of all the "patchwork and plagiarism" which are resorted to in this way, for the manufacture of books, would be to transcribe into these pages a large proportion of the prose compositions of our time. One instance, however, it may be proper

to quote, and that I shall take from Mrs. Foster's "Handbook of European Literature."

The title of this work indicates its character and scope. It is a compilation which any writer might have undertaken, and in the execution of which many a writer would have displayed both learning and research. From the catalogues and lists of publications of the several countries whose literature is noticed, Mrs. Foster copies the names of authors and of their works. So far no one is imposed upon, and no one has a right to complain. But the case is altered when we come to deal with the comments with which the authors' names are introduced. Such comments, when their origin is not indicated, are supposed to be the fruit of the writer's knowledge and experience; and to her we naturally assign any merit, for soundness or sagacity, to which they may be entitled. Now, I find that Mrs. Foster's notices, with very few exceptions, have been appropriated without acknowledgment from other writers. Some are copied from encyclopædias, some from magazines, some from reviews. Some are purloined from Sismondi; some from Roscoe; others from Macaulay; others again from Sir Bulwer Lytton. In one place a whole page of comments is adopted from one work; in another, the comments are made up of sentences cut out of different writers, and strung together with peculiar ingenuity. The book, in short, cannot

be more appropriately described than in the words of Hazlitt:" It is all patchwork and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness of borrowed wealth;" and this is carried to such an extent, that there is scarcely an important remark in its 452 pages that is not traceable to the writer from whom it has been taken.

At pages 10, 11, there is a notice of Petrarch, occupying twenty-two lines, which is given as part of Mrs. Foster's text, without inverted commas, or any other marks to show that the writer intended it as a quotation; yet the whole passage is copied word for word from Macaulay's "Essay on Machiavelli." Farther on, at pages 26, 27, Mrs. Foster has a paragraph of thirty lines on the subject of Machiavelli and his writings, which she has very dexterously appropriated from the same writer. The passage is not to be found anywhere in Macaulay in a consecutive form; but there is not a sentence in it that has not been picked out from some part of the Essay already referred to. Again, at pages 293 and 294, we have some twenty-five lines of comments on our British writers, which have been extracted verbatim from pages 61, 62, and 64, of Sir Bulwer Lytton's "England and the English."

What can be said in defence of this wholesale system of literary plunder? That the author preferred giving to the public the matured judg

ments of our great critical authorities, rather than her own crude and ill-expressed opinions? But then, why did she not acknowledge the sources from which she drew the observations ? She has done so in a few instances, and this proves that she intended the unacknowledged passages to be received as the emanations of her personal experience and sagacity. For the rest, nothing can be more imperfect than this compilation. Some of the best writers are not mentioned even by name; and in a great number of instances the names are incorrectly given, or the authors are inaccurately described. Of those that are named, the best works are frequently omitted; while, as regards the compiler's remarks, what is good is borrowed, and what is not borrowed is commonplace.

We hear a great deal in this age of what are called "Idées Napoléoniennes," the wisdom of Napoleon, and so forth. Some of this is invented by the writers, and ascribed to Napoleon; some of it is no wisdom at all; and some is what I call second-hand wisdom, an old familiar face with a new dress. Of this last sort is the famous saying:

"From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but a step."

For this remark Napoleon has obtained considerable notice. The truth, however, seems to be, that he adopted it from Tom Paine; Tom

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