Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/591

 The light from the lamp fell full upon his face. It was papa, if I ever saw him.”

That she was clear and rational, that she evidently believed what she asserted, Mr. Carlton saw. And though he could not give credence to so improbable a thing, nevertheless a feeling of uneasiness, lest Captain Chesney should be in pursuit, stole over him. He went to look for the stolid porter, who had disappeared, and found him at length in an outer shed, doing something to an array of tin lanterns. There he inquired about the fast train just gone by, and learnt to his satisfaction that it went whirling on, without stopping, on quite a different line of rail from that on which he and Laura were bound. He went back and told her this, observing that she must have been mistaken.

“Lewis, it is of no use your trying to persuade me out of my own eyesight. I wish I was as sure of forgiveness as I am that it was my father.”

He busied himself in many little cares for her, quite neglecting his own wet condition. Happening to look down, he perceived that of the two muddy feet she was holding to the fire, one was shoeless.

“Where’s your shoe, Laura?”

“It’s gone.”

“Gone!”

“It came off somewhere in the road as we walked along. Oh, it is all unfortunate together!”

“Came off in the road!” repeated Mr. Carlton, “But, my dear, why did you not speak? We could have found it; the man had the lantern.”

“I was afraid to stop; afraid that we should miss the train. And I don’t think I knew when I first lost it: the mud was up to my ankles.”

Not a very comfortable state of affairs, in truth; and poor Laura shivered and sighed, shivered and sighed, as they waited on for the midnight train. Don’t you ever attempt a similar escapade, my young lady reader, or the same perplexing griefs may fall to you.

, commenting upon some charges of apparent plagiarism brought against Coleridge, takes occasion to observe, “Continually he fancied other men’s thoughts his own; but such were the confusions of his memory, that continually, and with even greater liberality, he ascribed his own thoughts to others.” And in another place, “An author can hardly have written much or rapidly who does not sometimes detect himself, and perhaps therefore sometimes fail to detect himself, in appropriating the thoughts, images, or striking expressions of others. It is enough for his conscientious self-justification that he is anxiously vigilant to guard himself from such unacknowledged obligations, and forward to acknowledge them as soon as ever they are pointed out.”

The above is such a very fair explanation of many cases of supposed literary dishonesty, that it may properly be quoted here before proceeding to cite one or two curious instances of “parallel passages,” in the assembling of which it must by no means be supposed that any direct charges of plagiarism are for a moment contemplated. It is true that Mr. Puff, detected in pilfering from “Othello,” has given rather a ludicrous character to the explanation, that two people happened to hit on the same thought, and that” (in his case) “Shakespeare made the first use of it.” But notwithstanding, the plea has much good sense at the bottom of it; resemblance may be primâ facie suspicious; but it is nothing more. Certainly it is very far from being conclusive evidence of plagiarism. And two authors, acting independently, may light upon the same fancy, even to a similar form of expression and choice of words, just as honestly as inventions have been made, or planets discovered, coincidentally, by experimentalists or astronomers acting in entire ignorance of each other’s operations. Prejudice, however, will naturally be always on the side of the author who has the advantage in point of priority of production.

There is the less harm in adducing a suspicious passage from Sheridan, by reason of his having been the subject of the most wholesale charges of literary liabilities to others; and one more unit of accusation cannot matter much in his case. He was charged with having derived the plan of the “School for Scandal” from a MS. play sent into Drury-Lane Theatre by a young lady. Details were forthcoming; and the authoress was stated to be the daughter of a merchant in Thames Street, Bristol, and to have been carried off at an early age by a rapid consumption. Mr. Boaden and other patient investigators, however, could learn nothing of this youthful genius, in spite of repeated inquiries. That there is some indebtedness to Fielding’s “Tom Jones” is a more reasonable charge; while the resemblance of certain scenes both in the “Rivals” and the “School for Scandal” to passages in a forgotten book by Mrs. Sheridan, the mother of Richard Brinsley, called the “Memoirs of Sidney Biddulph,” is a fair matter for comment. It is even stated as a probable thing, that Mrs. Sheridan left among her papers two