The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and more recently not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced.  One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners.  But Chaucer is a huge borrower.  Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Bares Phrygius, Ovid and Statius.  Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Provencal poets are his benefactors; the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meung; Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino; The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie; The House of Fame, from the French or Italian; and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build his house.  He steals by this apology,—­that what he takes has no worth where he finds it and the greatest where he leaves it.  It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.  Thought is the property of him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately place it.  A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them they become our own.

Thus all originality is relative.  Every thinker is retrospective.  The learned member of the legislature, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands.  Show us the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes; the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitudes and resistance of something of their impressiveness.  As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think, for thousands; and so there were fountains all around Homer, Manu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,—­all perished—­which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder.  Did the bard speak with authority?  Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion?  The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer.  Is there at last in his breast a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that?  All the debts which such a man could contract to other wit would never disturb his consciousness of originality; for the ministrations of books and of other minds are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has conversed.