born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.  When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men—­but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his.  But not enough to signify.  It is merely a Waterloo.  It is Wellington’s battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed.  It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—­and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.  He added his little mite—­that is all he did.  These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest.  But nothing can do that.

Then why don’t we unwittingly reproduce the phrasing of a story, as well as the story itself?  It can hardly happen—­to the extent of fifty words except in the case of a child:  its memory-tablet is not lumbered with impressions, and the actual language can have graving-room there, and preserve the language a year or two, but a grown person’s memory-tablet is a palimpsest, with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase.  It must be a very rare thing that a whole page gets so sharply printed upon a man’s mind, by a single reading, that it will stay long enough to turn up some time or other and be mistaken by him for his own.  No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imagined to be our own, but that is about the most we can do.  In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes’s poems, in the Sandwich Islands.  A year and a half later I stole his dictation, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my “Innocents Abroad” with.  Then years afterwards I was talking with Dr. Holmes about it.  He was not an ignorant ass—­no, not he:  he was not a collection of decayed human turnips, like your “Plagiarism Court;” and so when I said, “I know now where I stole it, but whom did you steal it from,” he said, “I don’t remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anybody who had.”

To think of those solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart with their ignorant rubbish about plagiarism!  I couldn’t sleep for blaspheming about it last night.  Why, their whole lives, their whole histories, all their learning, all their thoughts, all their opinions were one solid ruck of plagiarism, and they didn’t know it and never suspected it.  A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they’ve caught filching a chop!  Oh, dam—­