Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-34.djvu/244

240 "Not hot enough by half, my boy," said he. "Put it by for a week, then read it; put it by for another week, and then—put it in your scrap-book, or, better still, put it in the fire. Stop! I'll save you the trouble." And he put it in the fire there and then, saying, "Now it is as hot as it can be made." So there was an end of that letter.

Now for the obverse of the picture. During the run of "Foul Play" in Manchester, we had gone over to pass Sunday at my house in York, and on our way back, after my wont, I bought all the papers and magazines I could lay my hands upon at the railway-station. Among them was a copy of a satirical journal called the "Mask." Upon opening it, I found a loathsome caricature of Reade and Boucicault on the first page, and, farther on, a violent personal attack on both authors, accusing them of wholesale robbery from a French drama (by an author whose name I have forgotten) called "La Portefeuille Rouge." Side by side with the Boucicault and Reade composition was printed the text of the French author. As I looked up I saw Reade in the opposite corner of the carriage, with his eyes closed. In certain moods he had a facility for feigning sleep, just like a cat waiting to spring upon an unfortunate mouse. Holding my breath, I furtively tried to slip the "Mask" under the seat. At this moment, to my astonishment, he opened his eyes wide, and said, "John, when you've done with that yellow magazine, hand it over this way."

I handed him the "Cornhill," and tried to hide the other behind me.

"Not this!" he said: "the other yellow thing!"

There was no help for it, so I gave it him. He cast a disdainful glance at the caricature, and shrugged his shoulders in silence; but when he had finished reading the acte d'accusation, he flushed up to the eyes, exclaiming, "It is a lie, an infamous calumny! I never even heard the name of the infernal piece."

I don't think he had; but if his collaborateur had not, I am very much mistaken. Anyhow, he had hit on the same idea, the same incidents, and something very like the same words as the Frenchman, only unfortunately the Frenchman had hit upon them first. The "undying one" was too old a bird, and too accustomed to poach upon other people's preserves, to be trepanned into correspondence on the subject. Reade, despite his good advice to me, rushed at his assailants like a bull at a piece of red rag, and vented his rage in a rabid and remarkable paper, published under the title of "The Sham Sample Swindle." It is easier, however, to pelt one's adversaries with hard words than to refute a charge of plagiarism, and in this instance it must be admitted the "pseudonymunculæ" had the best of it.

It was customary for Mr. Reade's detractors to assert that although he stigmatized them as thieves when they stole from him, yet he laid French authors under contribution with impunity. It must be admitted that "Les Chercheurs d'Or" was the foundation of "Gold," nor can it be denied that the inimitable "Jacky" was suggested by a long-forgotten drama called "Botany Bay." What then? "Hamlet" was founded upon Kyd's blood-and-thunder drama; "Othello," on a novel of Cynthio's.

"It is Never Too Late to Mend" is English to the backbone. The men are sons of the soil; Susan Merton is as sweet an English maiden as ever came out of Berkshire; the lines are idyllic English. There is not a pastoral scene in the story, either in England or Australia, in which the spectator does not "see green meadows and hear the bleating of sheep." while the crude savage of "Botany Bay" is transformed by the hand of genius into the wonderful creation of "Jacky." All authors are more or less plagiarists; but il y a fagots et fagots. Since Homer's time, men have parodied his incidents and paraphrased his sentiments. Molière alleged that he "took his own where he found it." But "the thief of all thieves was the Warwickshire thief," who stole right and left from everybody; but then he "found things lead and left