Examples.-I. A farmer prepares his sample of wheaten grain for market. His duty is to put his two hands fairly into the bulk and so fill his sample bag. But one day, in my experience, a Berkshire farmer picked his grain for show; that is, he went through the sample, and merely removed the inferior grains. He stood in the market with the sham sample, and readily sold twenty load of grain at more than its value. The fraud was detected, and the farmer driven out of the market.

2. Suppose some malicious rogue had access to a farmer's sample-bag, and were to remove the fine grains, and leave the inferior-that would destroy the farmer's sale, and be also a sham sample swindle. Of course nothing so wicked was ever done in agriculture; but there is a baser trade in the world than agriculture, and plied by dirtier hands than those which scatter dung upon our fields.

3. I read one day an article in a Quarterly Review, in which these two expressions occurred more than once, "the author of Robinson Crusoe," and "the author of the Lily and the Bee." Now, Defoe wrote several stupid stories, and one master-piece; Warren wrote several powerful stories and one foolish rhapsody; yet here, in the name of science (for criticism is science, or it is nothing) is Warren defined by his exceptional failure, and Defoe by his exceptional success; and that is one form of the sham sample swindle. [N.B. The dead are apt to get the sunny side of this swindle, and the living the windy side.]

4. A writer produces a great book. With all its beauties it is sure to have flaws, being written by man, who is an imperfect creature. The sham sample swindler picks out the flaw or flaws, quotes them bodily, which gives an air of honesty, and then says, "We could give a host of other examples, but these will serve to show the general character of the work."

The swindle lies in the words italicised. They declare a sham sample to be a true sample;

and, observe, this is a falsehood that cannot fail to deceive the reader. For why? The grain of truth that supports the falsehood is shown; the mass of truth that contradicts the falsehood is hidden.

5. A great work of fiction is written; it is rich in invention and novel combination; but, as men of genius have a singularly keen appreciation of all that is good, and can pick out pearls where obscure scribblers could see nothing but rubbish, the author has, perhaps, borrowed one or two things from other written sources, and incorporated them happily with the bulk of his invention. If so, they ought to be pointed out to the public, and are, of course, open to stricture from unlearned critics, who do not know to what an extent Shakespeare, Virgil, Molière, Corneille, Defoe, Le Sage, Scott, Dumas, &c., have pursued this very method, and how much the public gain by it. But the sham sample swindler is not content to point out the borrowed portion, and say honestly, so and so is not original, the rest may be. His plan is to quote the plagiarism, and then add, “And that part of the work we do not quote is all cut from the same cloth."

He tells this lie in cold blood, with his eyes upon the truth; and, as I said before, it is a fraud that can never fail on the spot, because the borrowed part of the work is in sight, the bulk of the work is out of sight.

So much by way of general description.

I come now to a remarkable example : Several journalists, not blessed with much power of reasoning on literary subjects, are repeating that Foul Play, a three volume novel, which originally appeared in this magazine, is a servile copy of an obscure French drama, called Le Portefeuille Rouge.

Not to waste time on echoes, I have traced this rumour to its source, a monthly magazine, called the Mask. Here the writer, in a form, the modesty and good taste of which I shall leave to the judge in whose court I may select to try the proprietors of the Mask for the libel, conveys to the public a comparison of the two works, and contemptuously comments upon the more brilliant and important of the two.

He conducts the comparison on a two-fold plan. First he deals with the incidents of the two works. Secondly, with the dialogue. But how? In the first branch of comparison he suppresses ths of the striking incidents in Foul Play, and at least ths of the strong incidents in Le Portefeuille Rouge, and, then, by slightly twisting the few incidents that survive this process, and by arbitrarily wording this double sham sample swindle in similar

12. Hélène, daughter of the preceding,-a weak, amiable girl, who parts with her virtue the first fair opportunity. This character is undistinguishable from a thousand others in French fiction.

13. Madame Delaunay, aunt to the preceding.
14. Miss Deborah, Hélène's gouvernante.
15. Jacqueline, Faustin's wife.

16. Mesdemoiselles Dufréne, Duthé, and Fel, young ladies it may be as well not to describe too minutely. 17. Ursule, a lady's-maid.

18. Marcel, a French Cockney, who gets sent to sea, an admirable character: indeed, the only new character in the drama.

19. An ape.

Now it is an axiom in literary criticism, that to invent incidents is a lower art than to invent characters; and the writer in the Mask fires off this axiom at me. So be it. I find nineteen distinct characters in Le Portefeuille Rouge, and, out of the nineteen, fifteen bear no shadow of resemblance, in act or word, to any character in Foul Play: yet of these fifteen many are the very engines of the play. I find twenty-one distinct characters in Foul Play, and, out of these, seventeen bear no resemblance, either in deed or word, to any character in Le Portefeuille Rouge. Yet these seventeen are busy characters, and take a large share in the plot.

As to the small balance of four persons, the two heroines are so opposite in character that no writer, whose eye was on the French Hélène, could possibly have created the

6. Helen (daughter of the preceding), a young lady of marked character, hard to win and hard to lose, virtuous under temptation, and distinguished by a tenacity of purpose which is rarely found in her sex. Upon the whole, a character almost new in fiction

7. Hiram Hudson, captain of the Proserpine, a good seaman, who has been often employed to cast away ships. When drunk, he descants on his duty to his employers. This character is based on reality, and is entirely new in fiction.

8. Joseph Wylie, his mate, a man of physical strength, yet cunning; a rogue, but a manly one, goaded by avarice, but stung by remorse.

9. Cooper, a taciturn sailor, with an antique friendship for talkative Welch.

10. Welch, a talkative sailor, with an antique friendship for taciturn Cooper. These two sailors are characters entirely new in fiction. So are their adventures and their deaths.

11. Joshua Fullalove, a character created by myself in Hard Cash, and reproduced in Foul Play with the consent of my collaborateur.

| English Helen. The same remark applies to De Folbert and Arthur Wardlaw: they are both rogues; but then they are opposite rogues. Why, they differ as widely as a bold highwayman and an anonymous slanderer.

Setting aside Incident, which awaits its turn in this comparison, I can find no characterexcept that of General Rolleston-which resembles a character in Foul Play. Kerveguen is a sailor and the captain of a ship; so far he corresponds, not with General Rolleston, but with the Captain Hudson of Foul Play. But then this sailor has a resolute character and a daughter, and she is the heroine of the drama. Now the soldier Rolleston has also a resolute character, and a daughter who is the heroine of Foul Play. The plagiarism of character, if any, is manifestly confined to the