Barbour County index. [volume] (Medicine Lodge, Kan.) 1880-current, 1890-07-16
PLAeIARIsTs OF OLD.
Famous borrowers of Thought Who Lives
Long Before Our Day.


Macaulay says somewhere, in effect,
that few people read Bacon's great
works, but this few are they who move
the world. To paraphrase this state
ment of Macaulay's it may be similarly
said of the present day, that very few
people knew of or read Massillon, but
of such are those who move and rule
the world.
All great orators and authors, from
the convolutions of their brains, where
are stored the thoughts they have read
in the books of the worlds best think
ers, at times consciously or unconscious
", present them afresh, but clothed in
the speakers or writer's own vocabu-
larry. If this be plagiarism, certainly
the world is vastly benefited by it, and
there are few who are in position to
cast the first stone.
In the his tory of literature, if all the
names, that are under the ban" were
published they would fill large vol
ume; l present only few, but which
are familiar to all readers:
Chaucer, the father of English poetry,
from whom all poets since his time have
drawn food of inspiration. was in the
sense referred to most unconscionable
plagiarist Thomas Jefferson, too, has
place on the list, for the sentiments of
the immortrl Declaration of Independ-
ence, in the same terse language of
1776, were first written at Runnymede
during that very remote period-the
reign of King John, and Jefferson's very
phraseology may be found in the Neck
lenburg declaration, a production ante
dating his some years. The enc
mics of Charles Sumner nauseated
the public by comparison of
one of his greatest efforts with we'll
known grafton of Demosthenes. Macau-
lay appropriates whole pages to himself
from Voltaire's "Louis Fourteenth" in
the sense of their ideas Washington
Irving was accused and convicted in the
same manner Emerson, in his beauti-
full poem entitled "Brahma" takes
bodily from the prehistoric testament of
India, the Bhavagad Gita. Some of the
most effective passages in Tristan
Shandy" may be found in Rabelais.
Gibbons decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire" contains page after page trans
lated from French and Italian historians.
Even Shakespeare's julius Caesar, An
thony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus,
present whole passages which are
simply the prose of Plutarch and others
thrown into blank verse. One of Ten
nyson's latest long poems, 1.-The
Lovers Tale" was conveyed" from
Boccaccio, and Boccaccio himself. from
whom nearly every modern writer of
poetry and fiction has scribbled without
stint or credit, was veritable plagiarist.
| Goethe, the giant of German literature,
did not think it immoral to use material
from Marlowe and Shakespeare, or to
work over in sonnet and elegy the
| stock figures and phases of the classics.
In fact, the complaint of Ecclesiastes
that there is nothing new under the
| sum-" is as true in literature as in sociol-
| ogy.s In the vast multitude of books
pouring from the press every year there
can scarcely be found new idea or a
| novel expression in one out of thou
sand Mr.. Bellamy, in Looking Back
ward" has plagiarized from articles
written in this country fifty years ago,
and from the English Gentleman's
Magazine, published in London in the
last century.-Henry Duncan, in Kansas
| City Star