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By Root 16660 0

granted, of course, that the thief was one of the upper ten thousand of thieves, and would not have put himself to the trouble of appropriating any garments that were not of indisputable bon ton, and patronised even by Professor Longfellow himself. The improbability of the literary theft, I say, is really a mere trifle in comparison with the broadcloth larceny. For the plagiarist is either a man of no note or a man of note. In the first case, he is usually an ignoramus, and getting possession of a rather rare book, plunders it without scruple, on the ground that nobody has ever seen a copy of it except himself. In the second case (which is a more general one by far) he pilfers from some poverty-stricken, and therefore neglected man of genius, on the reasonable supposition that this neglected man of genius will very soon cut his throat, or die of starvation, (the sooner the better, no doubt,) and that in the meantime he will be too busy in keeping the wolf from the door to look; after the purloiners of his property — and too poor, and too cowed, and for these reasons too contemptible, under any circumstances, to dare accuse of so base a thing as theft, the wealthy and triumphant gentleman of elegant leisure who has only done the vagabond too much honor in knocking him down and robbing him upon the highway.

The plagiarist, then, in either case, has very reasonable ground for expecting impunity, and at all events it is because he thinks so, that he perpetrates the plagiarism — but how is it with the count who steps into the shop of the tailor, and slips under his cloak the sky-blue dress[[-]]coat, and the yellow plaid pantaloons? He, the count, would be a greater fool in these matters than a count ever was, if he did not perceive at once, that the chances were about nine hundred and ninety-nine to one, that he would be caught the next morning before twelve o'clock, in the very first bloom and blush of his promenade down Broadway, by some one of those officious individuals who are continually on the qui vive to catch the counts and take away from them their sky-blue coats and yellow plaid pantaloons. Yes, undoubtedly; the count is very well aware of all this; but he takes into consideration, that although the nine hundred and ninety-nine chances are certainly against him, the one is just as certainly in his favor — that luck is everything — that life is short — that the weather is fine — and that if he can only manage to get safely through his promenade down Broadway in the sky-blue dress[[-]]coat and the yellow plaid pantaloons, he will enjoy the high honor, for once in his life, at least, of being mistaken by fifteen ladies out of twenty, either for Professor Longfellow, or Phœbus Apollo. And this consideration is enough — the half of it would have been more than enough to satisfy the count that, in putting the garments under his cloak, he is doing a very sagacious and very commendable thing. He steals them, then, at once, and without scruple, and, when he is caught arrayed in them the next morning, he is, of course, highly amused to hear his counsel make an oration in court about the "glaring improbability" of his having stolen them when he stole them — by way of showing the abstract impossibility of their ever having been stolen at all.

"What is plagiarism?" demands Outis at the outset, avec l'air d'un Romain qui sauve sa patrie — "What is plagiarism, and what constitutes a good ground for the charge?" Of course all men anticipate something unusually happy in the way of reply to queries so cavernously propounded; but if so, then all men have forgotten, or no man has ever known that Outis is a Yankee. He answers the two questions by two others — and perhaps this is quite as much as any one should expect him to do. "Did no two men," he says, "ever think alike without stealing one from the other? — or thinking alike, did no two men ever use the same or similar words to convey the thoughts, and that without any communication with each other? — To deny it is absurd." Of course it is — very absurd; and the only thing more