preached as his own the sermon of a brother divine, no longer living; he, too, was detected and promptly exposed by the parallel-column system, but nothing whatever happened from the exposure.  Every one must recall like instances, more or less remote.  I remember one within my youthfuller knowledge of a journalist who used as his own all the denunciatory passages of Macaulay’s article on Barrere, and applied them with changes of name to the character and conduct of a local politician whom he felt it his duty to devote to infamy.  He was caught in the fact, and by means of the parallel column pilloried before the community.  But the community did not mind it a bit, and the journalist did not either.  He prospered on amid those who all knew what he had done, and when he removed to another city it was to a larger one, and to a position of more commanding influence, from which he was long conspicuous in helping shape the destinies of the nation.

So far as any effect from these exposures was concerned, they were as harmless as those exposures of fraudulent spiritistic mediums which from time to time are supposed to shake the spiritistic superstition to its foundations.  They really do nothing of the kind; the table-tippings, rappings, materializations, and levitations keep on as before; and I do not believe that the exposure of the novelist who has been the latest victim of the parallel column will injure him a jot in the hearts or heads of his readers.

II.

I am very glad of it, being a disbeliever in punishments of all sorts.  I am always glad to have sinners get off, for I like to get off from my own sins; and I have a bad moment from my sense of them whenever another’s have found him out.  But as yet I have not convinced myself that the sort of thing we have been considering is a sin at all, for it seems to deprave no more than it dishonors; or that it is what the dictionary (with very unnecessary brutality) calls a “crime” and a “theft.”  If it is either, it is differently conditioned, if not differently natured, from all other crimes and thefts.  These may be more or less artfully and hopefully concealed, but plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it.  If you take a man’s hat or coat out of his hall, you may pawn it before the police overtake you; if you take his horse out of his stable, you may ride it away beyond pursuit and sell it; if you take his purse out of his pocket, you may pass it to a pal in the crowd, and easily prove your innocence.  But if you take his sermon, or his essay, or even his apposite reflection, you cannot escape discovery.  The world is full of idle people reading books, and they are only too glad to act as detectives; they please their miserable vanity by showing their alertness, and are proud to hear witness against you in the court of parallel columns.  You have no safety in the obscurity of the author from whom you take your own; there is always that most