Arizona weekly journal-miner., 1892-10-05
THE QUESTION OF PLAGIARISM.
Gems of Thought, It Appears, May He
 stolen if Phi fin New Settius.

Gems of Thought. It Appears, May He
 Stolen if Put in New Settings.
 No one has ever been able to de- fine what plagiarism is, and there fore 1t is unlikely that there should be any general agreement as to what makes a man liable to such charge. The question is perpetually recurring i'll other fields of literature as we'll as ill homiletics, and no one has laid down any scientific principle of suffi- cient clearness to decide all disputes. It cannot be that a man who is in debted to another for an idea is guilty of theft if he adapts it fer his own purposes; for, if such an appro- priation be fraud, nearly all modern writers have committed unpardon- able sins against the ancients.
 They may not have known every thing down in Judee. but the range of literary and speculative ideas was remarkably extensive in Greece, and If we are going to judge those of our writers-to confine ourselves only to our own nationality-who have owed inspiration to Athens, we shall have to condemn good many illustrious names. Chaucer, Spenser, Shake speare, Milton, Dryden, Pope-whose withers will be unwrungi A short time ago critic took occasion to draw up a list of instances in which the poet laureate had adopted thoughts and expressions from his predecessors It was wholly work of supererogation, for Lord Tenny- son would be the first to admit the debt which he, in common with other poets, owes to Homer and Vir- gil. Classical phrases are taken wholesale, as every student knows, witness such lines as This way and that dividing the swift mind,n and "She could not draw the quiet night into her bloodn-the last a capital in stance, for it assimilates and i'm proves upon the original.
 It is not freshness of thought alone, but also freshness of treat ment, which gives an author the right to call his work original. If we take the supreme instance of Shakespeare we see at once that the real question in many cases of this kind Is not where the writer got the idea, but what he had done with it. A poet. a novelist, an essayist, a preacher can take a hint in crude state and so transform it by the as- sociations and characteristics of his own mind that he is justly entitled to claim it as his own. He cannot be called & plagiarist, at all events; for many of these so called thefts are unconscious "reminiscences, un- recognized as such, which are worked into the texture of a mans own thoughts and made instinct with his own personality.
 In novels and romances, again, we have numerous instances of the same free exchange; no one ought to call it by harder name, unless he is able to discount the frequency of literary condolences or possesses a higher originality than that to which most of us can attain. Such refiec- tions, no doubt, were present in the minds of the Congregational union when they absolved Mir. Woods from the charges made against him. He was no plagiarist, because, while from Dr. Dykes valuable store he selected a few homiltic gems. he pre- scented them to his congregation at Clapton sparkling in some original setting of his own.-London Tele- graph.