“Plagiarism,” says The Dictionary, is “the act of appropriating the ideas or the language of another and passing them for one’s [sic!] own; literary theft.” It would not be very difficult, testing Belasco’s plays by that definition, and excluding all other considerations, to invest the charge of plagiarism against him, in some instances, with validity. The last part of “Hearts of Oak” is borrowed from Leslie’s “The Mariner’s Compass”; “La Belle Russe” is based on situations taken from “Forget Me Not” and “The New Magdalen”; the thrilling situation in the Third Act of “The Girl I Left Behind Me” is based on a similar situation in Boucicault’s “Jessie Brown; or, the Relief of Lucknow”; the agonizing situation in the Third Act of “The Darling of the Gods,” in which a military despot extorts information from a woman by forcing her to gaze on her lover subjected to torture, is derived (and bettered) from Sardou’s “La Tosca.” Other instances of similarity could be specified. It would, however, be a manifest injustice to stigmatize Belasco, and only Belasco, as a plagiarist on the

ground of his indebtedness to plays earlier than his. He has done only what all other dramatists have done since the beginning of the craft; that is, he has based some of his plays on dramatic expedients and situations that have long been considered to be common property.