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By Root 17018 0

the exact converse, trochaic. Seventeenth — regards the metre. Outis's is hexameter, alternating with pentameter, both acatalectic. Mine is octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic. Eighteenth and last has respect to the stanza — that is to say, to the general arrangement of the metre into masses. Of Outis's I need only say that it is a very common and certainly a very stupid one. My own has at least the merit of being my own. No writer, living or dead, has ever employed anything resembling it. The innumerable specific differences between it and that of Outis it would be a tedious matter to point out — but a far less difficult matter than to designate one individual point of similarity.

And now what are we to think of the eighteen identities of Outis — the fifteen that he establishes and the three that he could establish if he would — that is to say, if he could only bring himself to be so unmerciful? Of the whole eighteen, sixteen have shown themselves to be lamentable failures — having no more substantial basis than sheer misrepresentation, "too paltry for any man who values his reputation as a gentleman and a scholar," and depending altogether for effect upon the chances that nobody would take the trouble to investigate their falsehood or their truth. Two — the third and the eleventh — are sustained: and these two show that in both poems there is "an allusion to the departed," and that in both poems there is "a bird." The first idea that suggests itself, at this point, is, whether not to have a bird and not to have an allusion to a deceased mistress, would not be the truer features of distinctiveness after all — whether two poems which have not these items might not be more rationally charged with similarity than any two poems which have. But having thus disproved all the identities of Outis, (for any one comprehending the principle of proof in such cases will admit that two only, are in effect just nothing at all,) I am quite ready, by way again of affording him "fair play," to expunge every thing that has been said on the subject, and proceed as if every one of these eighteen identities were in the first bloom and deepest blush of a demonstration.

I might grant them as demonstrated, to be sure, on the ground which I have already touched — that to prove me or any body else an imitator, is no mode of showing that Mr. Aldrich or Mr Longfellow is not. But I might safely admit them on another and equally substantial consideration, which seems to have been overlooked by the zeal of Outis altogether. He has clearly forgotten that the mere number of such coincidences proves nothing, because at any moment we can oblige it to prove too much. It is the easiest thing imaginable to suggest — and even to do that which Outis has failed in doing — to demonstrate a practically infinite series of identities between any two compositions in the world — but it by no means follows that all compositions in the world have a similarity one with the other, in any comprehensible sense of the term. I mean to say that regard must be had not only to the number of the coincidences, but to the peculiarity of each — this peculiarity growing less and less necessary, and the effect of number more and more important, in a ratio prodigiously accumulative, as the investigation progresses. And again — regard must be had not only to the number and peculiarity of the coincidences, but to the antagonistic differences, if any, which surround them — and very especially to the space over which the coincidences are spread, and the number or paucity of the events, or incidents, from among which the coincidences are selected. When Outis, for example, picks out his eighteen coincidences (which I am now granting as sustained) from a poem so long as The Raven, in collation with a poem not forthcoming, and which may, therefore, for anything anybody knows to the contrary, be as long as an infinite flock of ravens, he is merely putting himself to unnecessary