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By Root 16884 0

can be committed? But, merely for courtesy's sake, I step aside from the exact matter in hand. In the case mentioned I should consider material differences in the terms of description as more remarkable than coincidences. Since the tree really looked like a chandelier, the true wonder would have been in likening it to anything else. Of course, nine common-place men out of ten would have maintained it to be a chandelier-looking tree. No poet of any pretention however, would have committed himself so far as to put such a similitude in print. The chandelier might have been poetically likened to the crystallized tree — but the converse is a platitude. The gorgeous unaltered handiwork of Nature is always degraded by comparison with the tawdry gew-gaws of Art — and perhaps the very uglist [[ugliest]] thing in the world is a chandelier. If "every reviewer in the land put the passage into Italics on account of the exceeding beauty of the imagery," then every printer's devil in the land should have been flogged for not taking it out of Italics upon the spot, and putting it in the plainest Roman — which is too good for it by one half

I put no faith in the nil admirari, and am apt to be amazed at every second thing which I see. One of the most amazing things I have yet seen, is the complacency with which Outis throws to the right and left his anonymous assertions, taking it for granted that because he (Nobody) asserts them, I must believe them as a matter of course. However — he is quite in the right. I am perfectly ready to admit anything that he pleases, and am prepared to put as implicit faith in his ipse dixit as the Bishop of Autun did in the Bible — on the ground that he knew nothing about it at all. We will understand it, then, not merely as an anonymous assertion but as an absolute fact, that the two chandelier authors "were not and never have been acquainted with each other, and that neither could have seen the work of the other before writing." We will agree to understand all this as indisputable truth, I say, through motives of the purest charity, for the purpose of assisting a friend out of trouble, and without reference to the consideration that no third person short of Signor Blitz or Professor Rogers could in any conceivable manner have satisfied himself of the truth of the twentieth part of it. Admitting this and everything else, to be as true as the Pentateuch, it follows that plagiarism in the case in question was a thing that could not by any possibility be — and do I rightly comprehend Outis as demonstrating the impossibility of plagiarism where it is possible, by adducing instances of inevitable similarity under circumstances where it is not? The fact is, that through want of space and time to follow Outis through the labyrinth of impertinences in which he is scrambling about, I am constrained much against my sense of decorum, to place him in the high-road of his argument, so that he may see where he is, and what he is doing, and what it is that he is endeavoring to demonstrate.

He wishes to show, then, that Mr. Longfellow is innocent of the imitation with which I have charged him, and that Mr. Aldrich is innocent of the plagiarism with which I have not charged him; and this duplicate innocence is expected to be proved by showing the possibility that a certain, or that any uncertain series of coincidences may be the result of pure accident. Now of course I cannot be sure that Outis will regard my admission as a service or a disservice, but I admit the possibility at once; and not only this, but I would admit it as a possibility were the coincidences a billion, and each of the most definitive peculiarity that human ingenuity could conceive. But in admitting this, I admit just nothing at all, so far as the advancement of Outis's proper argument is concerned. The affair is one of probabilities altogether, and can be satisfactorily settled only by reference to their Calculus.

"Pray," inquires Outis of Mr. Willis, "did you ever think the worse of Dana because your friend John Neal charged him with pirating