“There is no small degree of malicious craft in fixing upon a season to give a mark of enmity and ill will:  a word, a look, which at one time would make no impression, at another time wounds the heart, and, like a shaft flying with the wind, pierces deep, which, with its own natural force, would scarce have reached the object aimed at.”

This, it is evident, is but slightly altered, and by no means for the better, from the more terse and vigorous language of the Bishop: 

“There is no small cruelty in the picking out of a time for mischief:  that word would scarce gall at one season which at another killeth.  The same shaft flying with the wind pierces deep, which against it can hardly find strength to stick upright.”

But enough of these pieces de conviction.  Indictments for plagiarism are often too hastily laid; but there can be no doubt, I should imagine, in the mind of any reasonable being upon the evidence here cited, that the offence in this case is clearly proved.  Nor, I think, can there be much question as to its moral complexion.  For the pilferings from Bishop Hall, at any rate, no shadow of excuse can, so far as I can see, be alleged.  Sterne could not possibly plead any better justification for borrowing Hall’s thoughts and phrases and passing them off upon his hearers or readers as original, than he could plead for claiming the authorship of one of the Bishop’s benevolent actions and representing himself to the world as the doer of the good deed.  In the actual as in the hypothetical case there is a dishonest appropriation by one man of the credit—­in the former case the intellectual, in the latter the moral credit—­belonging to another:  the offence in the actual case being aggravated by the fact that it involves a fraud upon the purchaser of the sermon, who pays money for what he may already have in his library.  The plagiarisms from Burton stand upon a slightly different though not, I think, a much more defensible footing.  For in this case it has been urged that Sterne, being desirous of satirizing pedantry, was justified in resorting to the actually existent writings of an antique pedant of real life; and that since Mr. Shandy could not be made to talk more like himself than Burton talked like him, it was artistically lawful to put Burton’s exact words into Mr. Shandy’s mouth.  It makes a difference, it may be said, that Sterne is not here speaking in his own person, as he is in his Sermons, but in the person of one of his characters.  This casuistry, however, does not seem to me to be sound.  Even as regards the passages from ancient authors, which, while quoting them from Burton, he tacitly represents to his readers as taken from his own stores of knowledge, the excuse is hardly sufficient; while as regards the original reflections of the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy it obviously fails to apply at all.  And in any case there could be no necessity for the omission to