La BruyÈre said: 'Women often love liberty only to abuse it.' Two hundred years later Balzac wrote: 'There are women who crave for liberty in order to make bad use of it.' The thoughts are not great, they are not even true, but that is not the question. Could such a genius as Balzac be accused of plagiarism because he expressed a thought practically in the very words of La BruyÈre? I would as soon charge Balzac with plagiarism as I would accuse a Vanderbilt or a Carnegie of trying to cheat a street-car conductor out of a penny fare. The heroines of Tess and Adam Bede practically go through the same ordeals as Gretchen. Would you seriously accuse Thomas Hardy and George Eliot of plagiarism, and say that they owed their plots to Goethe's 'Faust'?

There are people engaged in literary pursuits, or, rather, in the literary trade, and, as a rule, not very successful at that, who spend their leisure time in trying to catch successful men in the act of committing plagiarism. The moment they can discover in their works a sentence that they can compare to a sentence written by some other author, they put the two sentences side by side and send them to the papers. There are papers always ready to publish that sort of thing. Of course, respectable papers throw those communications into the waste-paper baskets. Then, when the papers have published the would-be plagiarism, the perpetrator marks it in blue pencil at the four corners and sends it to the author—anonymously, of course. For that matter, whenever there appears anything nasty about a successful man in the papers—an adverse criticism or a scurrilous paragraph—he never runs the slightest risk of not seeing it; there are scores of failures, of crabbed, jealous, penurious nobodies who mail it to him. It does him no harm; but it does them good.

As far as I can recollect I have, during my twenty-one years of literary life, committed plagiarism four times: twice quite unintentionally, once through the inadvertence of a compositor, and once absolutely out of mere wickedness, just to draw out the plagiarism hunter. And I will tell you how it happened. Once, many years ago, I was reading a book on the French, written by an American. A phrase struck me as expressing a sentiment so true, so well observed, that I memorized it, and, unfortunately, when, several years later, I wrote a series of articles on France for a London paper, I incorporated the phrase. I was not long in being discovered. The author of the book, which had never sold, wrote to all the papers that I had 'stolen his book,' and thought the correspondence would start a sale for his book. Of course I was guilty, and I apologized, explaining how it had happened. For years the phrase had been in my mind—had, as it were, become part and parcel of myself. May this be a warning to authors who may take too great a fancy to a thought of theirs well expressed by some other author. It is a very dangerous practice. Another time I incorporated in a newspaper article a quotation from Emerson, but the compositor omitted the inverted commas, and Emerson's sentence read as if it was mine. Of course, no one would accuse me of choosing Emerson to plagiarize in America, but this article brought me half a dozen anonymous letters. In one of them there was this choice bit: 'The second half of the article is by Emerson; the first half I don't know, but probably not by the author.' Twenty centuries of Christianity have caused Christians to love one another. But when I really had a good time was when, deliberately, as I said before, out of sheer wickedness, I introduced into my text nine lines of Shakespeare.

I have kept the newspapers that commented on it and the anonymous letters that were mailed to me. One of them had humour in it. 'My dear sir,' said the writer, 'when you speak of an incident as being a personal reminiscence, it is a mistake to borrow it of an author so widely known for the last three centuries as the late William Shakespeare.'

A celebrated literary friend of mine once amused himself in incorporating twenty lines of Dickens as his own in the midst of an essay he published in his own paper.

When he feels dull, he takes from his shelves a scrapbook which contains the letters and newspaper cuttings referring to the subject.

When a literary man has a reputation of long standing, never for a moment accuse him of plagiarism. He may express a thought already expressed by someone else; he may work out a plot which is not original; but success that lasts rests on some personal merit. I have never heard successful men charge any of their brethren of the pen with plagiarism. Successful men are charitable to their craft, as beautiful women are to their sex.