believe that I am not alone in this, but that there are many who are doing the same work according to their strength and opportunities better or worse than I, but always with the same aim,—because of this I have said my say to-day. We are not all of us money-makers, Mr. Waters. Some of us still "have no time to get rich," as Agassiz said. Some of us still believe that there is something higher in life than the pork-market.
My own audience is as small as is their stature. The readers of Lippincott's probably never heard of me but once, so I may be pardoned if I use a nom de plume below. But, as a last word, let me say again, think better of us, Mr. Waters, think better of us! There are more precious things in the universe than gold and fame. J. P. T.
BOOK-TALK.
LAST month some harmless heresies were printed in this department on the subject of plagiarism. But the ink had hardly dried on the Reviewer's manuscript ere the Providence which is known to hate heretics sent a swift and cruel retribution,—the messengers chosen to convey the divine wrath being, of all people in the world, the Messrs. Harper Brothers, who have republished in their Franklin Square Series Walter Besant's "The Holy Rose." It will be remembered that the Reviewer showed a genial tolerance towards the actions of Charles Reade, Thomas Hardy, and others in rescuing some of the flotsam and jetsam of literature and claiming them as their own, urging that, so far at least as he was concerned, these novelists had simply given him a certain amount of pleasure which might never have been his had he been left unaided to explore the literary ocean. But when a light little ephemeral skiff seeks to claim salvage in one of the Great Easterns of literature, sailing proudly and calmly on to the haven of immortality, the effect is ridiculous and even painful. Every well-educated man is acquainted with Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities." To take the plot of that story, altering it in unessential details, but emphasizing its resemblance in essentials by preserving the locale and the period, is an offence that cannot be condoned; but, unfortunately, the innocent reader suffers more than the guilty author. It is no defence to urge that the donnée was not original with Dickens, that the central idea—a man's profiting by an extraordinary resemblance to a condemned prisoner in whom he was interested to substitute himself in the prisoner's place—had been used in this or that story, poem, or drama before the "Tale of Two Cities." There is no such resemblance between the "Tale of Two Cities" and any literary work that preceded it as there is between "The Holy Rose" and "A Tale of Two Cities." Moreover, when a great genius has preempted a story, even if at one time it were common property, it is just as well for succeeding mediocrities to respect his claim. We want no more "Hamlets," no more "Romeo and Juliets," since Shakespeare.
Of course the line must be drawn somewhere. It would not do to say that a great genius must be left in the undisturbed possession of those stock situations which are subject to infinite diversity of treatment. Shakespeare has used,
