asked no more about it. The accuser,
confounded, was obliged to disavow his manoeuvre, and ask pardon for
it.

Since then a new edition of Masenius was printed in 1757. The literary
public was surprised at the large number of very beautiful verses with
which the Sarcotis was sprinkled. It is in truth nothing but a long
declamation of the schools on the fall of man: but the exordium, the
invocation, the description of the garden of Eden, the portrait of Eve,
that of the devil, are precisely the same as in Milton. Further, it is
the same subject, the same plot, the same catastrophe. If the devil
wishes, in Milton, to be revenged on man for the harm which God has done
him, he has precisely the same plan in the work of the Jesuit Masenius;
and he manifests it in verses worthy maybe of the century of Augustus.
("Sarcotis," I., 271 _et seq._)

One finds in both Masenius and Milton little episodes, trifling
digressions which are absolutely alike; both speak of Xerxes who covered
the sea with his ships. Both speak in the same tone of the Tower of
Babel; both give the same description of luxury, of pride, of avarice,
of gluttony.

What most persuaded the generality of readers of Milton's plagiarism was
the perfect resemblance of the beginning of the two poems. Many
foreigners, after reading the exordium, had no doubt but that the rest
of Milton's poem was taken from Masenius. It is a very great error and
easy to recognize.

I do not think that the English poet imitated in all more than two
hundred of the Jesuit of Cologne's verses; and I dare say that he
imitated only what was worthy of being imitated. These two hundred
verses are very beautiful; so are Milton's; and the total of Masenius'
poem, despite these two hundred beautiful verses, is not worth anything
at all.

Moliere took two whole scenes from the ridiculous comedy of the "Pedant
Joue" by Cyrano de Bergerac. "These two scenes are good," he said as he
was jesting with his friends. "They belong to me by right: I recover my
property." After that anyone who treated the author of "Tartufe" and "Le
Misanthrope" as a plagiarist would have been very badly received.

It is certain that generally Milton, in his "Paradise", has in imitating
flown on his own wings; and it must be agreed that if he borrowed so
many traits from Grotius and from the Jesuit of Cologne, they are
blended in the crowd of original things which are his; in England he is
always regarded as a very gr