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EVERY great poet has at one time or another been accused of being a great thief. The old Greek mythology, which concealed an overflowing wisdom in its poetic fables, and in the passions and adventures of its gods and goddesses-things merely fanciful or grotesque to the vulgar, but full of deep meaning for the inner circle of souls-prefigured the idea of plagiarism by representing Hermes as the Inventor of the Lyre and the God of Thieves. It must be confessed that, in most cases, when a charge of plagiarism has been fixed upon a great author, the proof has been easy. But what does it signify? The mighty masters of song are none the less mighty for an occasional peccadillo of this kind. Perfect originality is impossible, unless it be the originality of the maniac. Every writer is of necessity indebted to his contemporaries and his predecessors. He lives in the great ocean of human thought, and could not think if there had not been no thinkers before him. If Shakspere had been left in his childhood on a desert island, and had remained there all his life, he might have been an Orson or a Robison Crusoe, but he never could have written or even imagined his immortal plays. If there had been no mathematics before the days of Newton, he would never have discovered the law of gravitation. It is only when an inferior author takes the thoughts and the ipsissima verba of great writers, and passes off the plunder as his own property, that the charge of plagiarism is worth entertaining. Sensible men attach but little importance to it in the case of those who have genius enough of their own to entitle them to stand in the first rank, and who would remain immeasurably rich without the misappropriation of other people's ideas. He who purloins a penny worth of literary old iron, and converts it, in the furnace of his mind, to finely tempered steel, worth a hundred thousand times the amount, is not to be -condemned in a literary point of view, but to be lauded. The charge of plagiarism falls to the ground in such cases, and is of no account. It must be remembered, too, that there is a kind of plagiarism which is quite

VOL. XXXII. NO. IV.

involuntary and unconscious. The echo of another man's wisdom or wit may remain in the mind long after all remembrance has been lost of the source whence it was derived. Besides, as Coleridge remarked, "There are such things as fountains in the world ;" and it must not be imagined that every stream which is seen flowing "comes from a perforation made in another man's tank." Upon the subject of plagiarism, we borrow from the second volume of the Autobiographic Sketches of Thos. de Quincey, recently published, the following interesting anecdotes in connection with Coleridge. We will not let the occasion pass without a word or two in commendation of this admirable book. It forms the history of a human mind, and that mind one of a high order. For humor, for learning, for pathos, and for comma'ad of language, we know of no work in modern times that excels it. De Quincey had long been anxious to see Coleridge, and the conversation which he narrates arose out of a visit made in 1805 to a Mr. Poole, who, he expected would be able to introduce hi'n to the poet :

The first, morning of my visit, Mr. Poole was so bind as to propose, knowing my admiration of Wordsworth, that we should ride over to Alfoxton, a place of singular interest to myself, as having been occupied in his unmarried days by that poet during the minority of Mr. St. Aubyn, its present youthful proprietor. At this delightful spot, the ancient residence of an ancient English family,. and surrounded by those ferny Quantock hillswhich are so beautifully glanced at in the poem of "Ruth," Wordsworth, accompanied by his sister, had passed a good deal of the interval between leaving the university (Cambridge) and the period of his final settlement amongst his native lakes of West-moreland; some allowance, however, must. be made but how much, I do not accurately know for a long residence in France, for a short one in North Germany, for an intermitting one in London, and for a regular domestication with his sister,, at Race Down,. in Dorsetshire.

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Returning late from this interesting survey, we found ourselves without company at dinner; and, being thus seated, Mr. Poole propounded the following question to me, which I mention, because it furnished me with the first hint of a singular infirmity besetting Coleridge's mind "Pray, my young friend, did you ever form any opinion or conjecture of others, upon that most revolting dogma of Pythagoras about beans? You know what I mean; that monstrous doctrine in which he asserts that a man might as well, for the wickedness of the thing, eat his own grandmother as meddle with beans.'"

"Yes," I replied, "the line is, I believe, in the Golden Verses. I remember it well.'

P. "True. Now our dear, excellent friend Coleridge, than whom God never made a creature more divinely endowed, yet, strange it is to say, sometimes steals from other people, just as you or I might do I beg your pardon, just as a poor creature like myself might do, that sometimes have not wherewithal to make a figure from my own exchequer; and the other day, at a dinner party, this question arising about Pythagoras and his beans, Coleridge gave us an interpretation which, from his manner, I suspect not to have been original. Think, therefore, if you have any where read a plausible solution."

"I have; and it was in a German author. This German, understand, is a poor stick of a man, not to be named on the same day with Coleridge; so that, if Coleridge should appear to have robbed him, be assured that he has done the scamp too much honor." P. " Well, what says the German?" Why, you know the use made in Greece of beans, in voting and balloting? Well, the German says, that Pythagoras speaks symbolically; meaning that electioneering, or more generally all interference with political intrigues, is fatal to a philosopher's pursuits, and their appropriate serenity. Therefore, says he, follower of mine, abstain from public affairs as you would from parricide.'

P. "Well, then, Coleridge has done the scamp too much honor; for, by Jove! that is the very explanation he gave us !"

Here was a trait of Coleridge's mind, to be first made known to me by his best friend; and first published to the world by me, the foremost of his admirers! But both of us had sufficient reasons. Mr. Poole knew that, stumbled on by accident, such a discovery would be likely to impress upon a man, as yet unacquainted with Coleridge, a most injurious jealousy with regard to all he might write; whereas, frankly avowed by one who knew

him best, the fact was disarmed of its sting; since it thus became evident that when the case had been best known and most investigated, it had not operated to his serious disadvantage. On the same argument-to forestall other discoverers who would make a more unfriendly use of the discovery, and also as matters of literary curiosity-I shall here point out a few others of Coleridge's unacknowledged obligations, noticed by myself, in a very wide course of reading.*

1. The Hymn to Chamouni is an expansion of a short poem in stanzas upon the same subject, by Frederica Brun, a female poet of Germany, previously known to the world under the maiden name of Munter. The mere framework of the poem is exactly the same— an appeal to the most impressive features of the regal mountain, (Mont Blanc,) adjuring them to proclaim their author; the torrent, for instance, is required to say by whom it had been arrested in its headlong raving, and stiffened, as by the petrific touch of Death, into everlasting pillars of ice; and the answer to these impassioned apostrophes is made by the same choral burst of rapture. In mere logic, therefore, and even as to the choice of circumstances, Coleridge's poem is a translation. On the other hand, by a judicious amplification of some topics, and by its far deeper tone of lyrical enthusiasm, the dry bones of the German outline have been awakened by Coleridge into the fulness of life. It is not, therefore, a paraphrase, but a recast of the original. And how was this calculated, if frankly avowed, to do Coleridge any injury with the judicious?

2. A more singular case of Coleridge's infirmity is this: In a very noble passage of "France," a fine expression or two occur from "Samson Agonistes." Now to take a phrase

*In a note at the end of the volume, Mr. De

Quincey says: "The solution of the Pythagorean dark saying about beans (concerning the appropriation of which by Coleridge such varied opinions have been pronounced) does not need to be sought in German editions of Pythagoras, nor in the traditions of academic tuition: it is to be found in

Plutarch. An hour or two after I had sent off his final note to the press, (distant, unfortunately, seven miles, and accessible only by a discontinuous, or zig zag line of communication,) I remembered, from a foot-note on Jeremy Taylor's 'Holy Living, the following reference to Plutarch, which the Bishop has chosen (against his usual practice) to give in Latin rather than in Greek: 'Fabis abstine," dixit Pythagoras, olim inim magistratus per suffra said Pythagoras, for in former times magisteri gia fabis lata creabantur. (Abstain from beans offices were created through suffrages conveyed beans,' ")

or an inspiriting line from the great fathers of poetry, even though no marks of quotation should be added, carries with it no charge of plagiarism. Milton is justly presumed to be as familiar to the ear as nature to the eye; and to steal from him as impossible to appropriate or sequester to a private use some "bright particular star." And there is a good reason for rejecting the typographical marks of quotation-they break the continuity of the passion, by reminding the reader of a printed book; on which account Milton himself (to give an instance) has not marked the sublime words "tormented all the air" as borrowed; nor has Wordsworth, in applying to an unprincipled woman of commanding beauty the memorable expression, "a weed of glorious feature," thought it necessary to acknowledge it as originally belonging to Spenser. Some dozens of similar cases might be adduced from Milton. But Coleridge, when saying of republican France that,

Insupportably advancing, Her arm made mockery of the warrior's tramp, not satisfied with omitting the marks of acknowledgment, thought fit positively to deny that he was indebted to Milton. Yet who could forget the semi-chorus in the "Samson," when the bold "Ascalonite" is described as having fled from his "lion ramp ?" Or who, that was not in this point liable to some hallucination of judgment, would have ventured in a public challenge (for virtually it was that) to produce from the "Samson" words so impossible to be overlooked as those of "insupportably advancing the foot?" The result was, that one of the critical journals placed the two passages in juxtaposition, and left the reader to his own conclusion with regard to the poet's veracity. But in this instance it was common sense rather than veracity which the facts impeach.

3. In the year 1810 I happened to be amusing myself by reading in their chronological order the great classical circumnavigation of the earth; and, coming to Shelvocke, I met with a passage to this effect: that Hatley, his second captain, (i. e., lieutenant,) being a melancholy man, was possessed by a fancy that some long season of foul weather in the solitary sea which they were then traversing, was due to an albatross which had steadily pursued the ship; upon which he shot the bird, but without mending their condition. There at once I saw the germ of the Ancient Mariner; and I put the question to Coleridge acordingly. Could it have been imagined that he would see cause utterly to disown so slight

an obligation to Shelvocke? Wordsworth, a man of stern veracity, on hearing of this, professed his inability to understand Coleridge's meaning; the fact being notorious, as he told me, that Coleridge had derived from the very passage I had cited the original hint of the action of the poem; though it is very possible, from something which Coleridge said on another occasion, that, before meeting a fable in which to embody his ideas, he had meditated a poem on delirium confounding its own dream-scenery with external things, and connected with the imagery of high latitudes.

Yet,

4. All these cases amount to nothing at all as cases of plagiarism, and for this reason expose the more conspicuously that obliquity of feeling which seeks to decline the very slight acknowledgments required. But now I come to a case of real and palpable plagiarism; yet that, too, of a nature to be quite unaccountable in a man of Coleridge's attainments. It is not very likely that this particular case will soon be detected; but others will. who knows? Eight hundred or a thousand years hence, some reviewer may arise, who, having read the "Biographia Literaria" of Coleridge, will afterwards read the philosophical works of Schelling, the great Bavarian professor; and he will then make a singular discovery. In the " Biographia Literaria" occurs a dissertation on the reciprocal relations of the esse and the cogitatie, that is, of the objective and the subjective; and an attempt is made, by inverting the postulates from which the argument starts, to show how each might arise, as a product by an intelligible genesis, from the other. It is a subject which, since the time of Fichte, has much occupied the German metaphysicians; and many thousands of essays have been written on it, or indirectly so, of which many hundreds have been read by many tens of persons. Coleridge's essay, in particular, is prefaced by a few words, in which, aware of his coincidence with Schelling, he declares his willingness to acknowledge himself indebted to so great a man, in any case where the truth will allow him to do so; but in this particular case insisting on the impossibility that he could have borrowed arguments which he had first seen some years after he had thought out the whole hypothesis proprio marte. After this, what was my astonishment to find that the entire essay, from the first word to the last, is a verbatim translation from Schelling, with no attempt in a single instance to appropriate the paper by developing the arguments, or by diversifying the illustrations! Some other obligations to Schelling, of a