erbilt 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