One may reasonably look at it in this way.  What business has a man to think of things right in front of you, poke his head, as it were, into your light?  What right has he to set up dams and tunnel out swallow-holes to deflect the current of your thoughts?  Surely you may remove these obstructions, if it suits you, and put them where you will.  Else all literature will presently be choked up, and the making of books come to an end.  One might as well walk ten miles out of one’s way because some deaf oaf or other chose to sit upon a necessary stile.  Surely Shakespeare or Lamb, or what other source you contemplate, has had the thing long enough?  Out of the road with them.  Turn and turn about.

And inverted commas are so inhospitable.  If you must take in another man’s offspring, you should surely try to make the poor foundlings feel at home.  Away with such uncharitable distinctions between the children of the house and the stranger within your gates.  I never see inverted commas but I think of the necessary persecuted mediaeval Jew in yellow gabardine.

At least, never put the name of the author you quote.  Think of the feelings of the dead.  Don’t let the poor spirit take it to heart that its monumental sayings would pass unrecognised without your advertisement.  You mean well, perhaps, but it is in the poorest taste.  Yet I have seen Patience on a Monument honourably awarded to William Shakespeare, and fenced in by commas from all intercourse with the general text.

There is something so extremely dishonest, too, in acknowledging quotations.  Possibly the good people who so contrive that such signatures as “Shakespeare,” “Homer,” or “St. Paul,” appear to be written here and there to parts of their inferior work, manage to justify the proceeding in their conscience; but it is uncommonly like hallmarking pewter on the strength of an infinitesimal tinge of silver therein.  The point becomes at once clear if we imagine some obscure painter quoting the style of Raphael and fragments of his designs, and acknowledging his indebtedness by appending the master’s signature.  Blank forgery!  And a flood of light was thrown on the matter by a chance remark of one of Euphemia’s aunts—­she is a great reader of pure fiction—­anent a popular novel:  “I am sure it must be a nice book,” said she, “or she could not get all these people to write the mottoes for the chapters.”

No, it is all very well to play with one’s conscience.  I have known men so sophisticated as to assert that unacknowledged quotation was wrong.  But very few really reasonable people will, I think, refuse to agree with me that the only artistic, the only kindly, and the only honest method of quotation is plagiary.  If you cannot plagiarise, surely it were better not to quote.

ON THE ART OF STAYING AT THE SEASIDE

A MEDITATION AT EASTBOURNE