Joss Pidgin man he soon begin Cause some man speakee-he can hear- That young man die-one largee dog see, MORAL. You too muchee laugho! what for sing? I tink you no savey what ting? S'pose you no b'long cleber inside, Pigs, An't please the, a current English vulgarism. It is usually explained as a corruption of “an't please the pyx," understanding thereby the consecrated wafer deposited in the pyx, and so making it equivalent to "Deo volente" in the minds of transubstantiationalists. Others, however, see in pyx not the box in which the host was kept, but the box used in English coinage for certain coins kept as a test of the weight and fineness of the metal before it is sent from the mint. Either explanation is plausible, neither is convincing. The derivation which looks upon pigs as being a corruption of pixies -i.e., fairies-has about equal, though no greater, claims to serious etymological consideration. It is said that in Devonshire to this day "an't please the pixies" is a common phrase. Pillar to post. This familiar English expression is said to be derived from a custom practised in the manège, or riding-school. The pillar was placed in the centre of the riding-ground, and the columns or posts were arranged two and two round the circumference of the ring, at equal distances. Hence "from pillar to post" signified going from one thing to another without any definite purpose. This, on the whole, seems more likely than the alternative derivation from the German "Von Pilatus zu Pontius" or "Von Pontius zu Pilatus" (in itself a corruption of "Von Pontius Pilatus zu Herodes"), which means to send a man who is in want of advice from one quarter to another, without enabling him to attain the desired information or advice. Pink, the conventional sporting name for scarlet, the color of the hunting-coat used especially in fox-hunting. Exactly when this coat came into fashion, and why, are still moot questions. There is a story that it originated in the mishap of a military officer who, once upon a time, having lost his baggage, was compelled to hunt in his regimentals. His host began by excusing the breach of etiquette, and ended by perceiving the beauty and fitness of the change. But this story wears a decidedly mythical air. The old hunting-song records the fact that John Peel, of Cumberland renown, wore gray, and in times long gone by the thirty huntsmen of the Lords Berkeley, whose kennels were at the village of Charing (now Charing Cross), arrayed themselves in tawny coats. But this may have been merely the result of a temporary Jacobite prejudice against scarlet, because the 'illustrious House of Hanover" was credited with introducing it as the color of the royal livery. The tradition of "Oliver's red-coats," who constrained the king's guards for a while to clothe themselves in "Oxford blue," may also have had something to do with it. The "pink" coats of the hunting-field are at least old enough to have gone through a considerable variety of fashions. The earliest have been likened 891 for length and fulness to scarlet dressing-gowns. Fashion then went to the opposite extreme of tight swallow-tails; the latter were succeeded by the morning-coat pattern, now generally giving way to the single-breasted frock. The "Pink 'un" is a sobriquet for the English Sporting Times, which, like its Anerican namesake and imitator, is printed on pink paper. Pipe-Eye. During the celebrated Westminster election of 1784 the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire enthusiastically espoused the cause of Charles James Fox, going so far as to purchase the vote of a butcher with a kiss. It was on another of these canvassing visits that an Irish dustman paid her the famous compliment, "Let me light my pipe at your ladyship's eyes." The duchess was delighted, and often said, "Oh, after the dustman's compliment, "Cynthia's all others are insipid." It is not at all likely that the Irishman was familiar with Ben Jonson, yet the same daring figure may be found in “ Revels," Act v., Sc. 2: Mer. Your cheeks are Cupid's baths, wherein he uses to steep himself in milk and nectar: he does light all his torches at your eyes, and instructs you how to shoot and wound with their beams. Still less likely is it that he had ever run across the following lines in Tibullus, iv. 2: magnæ Calendis A phrase Pipe of peace, Smoking the,—i.e., to sit in friendly council. derived from the custom of American Indians, who in making treaties or other friendly negotiations would pass a lighted pipe (called a calumet) from mouth to mouth, to signify the peaceful nature of the meeting. The familiar locution "Put that in your pipe and smoke it" may have some reference to the phrase. It is said Pipe-laying, in American slang, procuring fraudulent votes. to have arisen in 1835, when the leaders of the Whig party in New York were accused of a gigantic scheme to bring on voters from Philadelphia. The work of laying down pipes for the Croton water was then in active operation. A certain agent of the Whigs turned traitor and placed in the hands of the Democrats a mass of correspondence, mainly letters written by himself to various parties in New York, apparently describing the progress and success of his operations. In these letters the form of a mere business correspondence was adopted,-the number of men hired to visit New York and vote being spoken of as so many yards of pipe. The Whig leaders were actually indicted and the letters read in court, but the jury believed neither in them nor in the writer of them, and the accused were acquitted. For ourselves Plagiarism and Plagiarists. Is plagiarism a crime? we confess that we hold it only a venial offence-unless, of course, it is found out. If a man thrills us with the joy and gladness of a great thought, what matter where he got it? We might have passed our lives in ignorance thereof. The discoverer is as great a benefactor as the originator. And then, to be Irish, the originator may not have originated it. We have often wondered why it was that the stupid ogres and other monsters of the fairy-tales, who Not all the ingewished to give an impossible task to the prince they had got into their clutches, never set him to tracing an idea to its source. nuity of Prince Charming, aided by all the magic arts of all the Grateful Beasts and Enchanted Princesses and other adventitious allies, could have saved that tender young prince from gracing the ogre's larder. "Of all forms of theft," says Voltaire, "plagiarism is the least dangerous to society." Not only that, it is often beneficial. In mechanics all inventions are plagiarisms. If inventors had not borrowed ideas from their predecessors, progress would come to a stand-still. Shall I refuse to own a timepiece because my watchmaker is not original? Shall I eschew the benefits of the modern railroad because I find the germ of the idea in the steamengine of the pre-Christian Hero? "A ship," says Emerson, "is a quotation from a forest." But inasmuch as it is not enclosed in quotation-marks a ship is rank plagiarism. Shakespeare stole plots, incidents, and ideas from his forerunners. Molière derived not only his plots, but the dialogues of whole scenes, from Italian comedies. Thank God that these great men had no literary conscience! Molière openly acknowledged he had none. "I conquer my own wherever I find it," he says, with magnificent candor. And we get a new regard for Pope when we find him openly acknowledging, “I freely confess that I have served myself all I could by reading." Mr. Cordy Jeaffreson has laid down the maxim that originality can be expected from nobody save a lunatic, a hermit, or a sensational novelist. But Andrew Lang calls this a hasty generalization. "People," he says, "will inevitably turn to these members of society (if we can speak thus of hermits and lunatics), and ask them for originality, and fail to get it, and express disappointment. For all lunatics are like other lunatics, and no more than sane men can they do anything original. As for hermits, one hermit is the very image of his brother solitary. There remain sensational novelists to bear the brunt of the world's demand for the absolutely unheard-of, and, naturally, they cannot supply the article. So mankind falls on them, and calls them plagiarists. It is enough to make some novelists turn lunatics and others hermits." Let us take the case of Disraeli's famous funeral oration over Wellington. It proved to have been stolen bodily from a review article by Thiers on Marshal Saint-Cyr. A rather neat epigram on the affair appeared in the Examiner: In sounding great Wellington's praise, But now mark what far-reaching benefits accrued from Disraeli's plagiarism. In the first place, he gave a great deal of pleasure to his hearers which he could not have given otherwise. The review article was better than anything he could have offered himself, otherwise he would not have filched it. Now, the pleasure was an actual pleasure; when the moment had fled, it could not be retracted or embittered by any subsequent development. Then he gave his critics the pleasure of detecting him,-a great delight accorded to a worthy and deserving and very hard-worked class. The whole of England was aroused, amused, and interested. In fact, Disraeli proved himself an allround benefactor. Nobody was injured, not even Thiers. For although we are pleased to say, in our metaphorical language, that a plagiarist shines in stolen plumes, not a plume is really lost by the fowl who originally grew them. Disraeli, indeed, was a perpetual plagiarist. There is hardly a clever mot, a quotable saying, in all his books, which can be called original. Who bears him any grudge for that? He may not have mined the gold, but he purified it, stamped it with his own sign-manual, and sent it into circulation. The famous passage in his speeches comparing the members of the opposition to extinct volcanoes was inspired by a passage in Hope's "Anastasius,” a book which also suggested some of the best portions of "Tancred." The peroration of his speech on the Corn Law Bill (May 15, 1846) was taken from Urquhart's Diplomatic Transactions in Central Asia." In the first edition of Venetia," a passage was "conveyed" from Macaulay's essay on Byron. The famous phrase in Lothair," "You know who the critics are, the men who have failed in literature and art," is the expression, almost in the same words, of a thought that had already occurred to Landor, to Balzac, to Dumas, to Pope, to Shenstone, to Dryden. (See CRITICS.) A correspondent of the Athenæum in 1873 produced some very curious evidence that Mr. Disraeli, when in his novel "Venetia" he sketched Lord Caducis,-who is, of course, intended for Lord Byron,-had before him at least one unpublished letter purporting to have been written by Byron. The letter in question was in the writer's possession, and is dated Pisa, April 12, 1822 (about three months before Shelley's death, when Byron was certainly in Pisa). It contains some sentences which are repeated word for word by Lord Caducis in the fourth chapter of the sixth book of "Venetia :" "When I once take you in hand, it will be difficult for me not 'to make sport of the Philistines.' Now we look upon ourselves as something, O fellows with some pith; how we could lay it on! I think I see them wincing under the thong, the pompous poltroons." And again: "I made out a list, the other day, of all the things and persons I have been compared to. It begins well with Alcibiades, but ends with the Swiss giantess, or the Polish dwarf, I forget which." The Hon. Mr. John J. Ingalls once performed a feat very like Disraeli's Wellington oration. In May, 1890, he delivered an eloquent eulogy on a recently-deceased gentleman named J. N. Barnes. It was highly praised as a splendid bit of rhetoric. For a few days Mr. Ingalls was the hero of the hour. Then some newspaper fiend discovered that the eulogy had been calmly appropriated from a sermon by Massillon. He published his discovery in those fatal parallel columns which often have proved so deadly a weapon of offence in the hands of the malicious. We will take the concluding paragraph to show the method of the great orator: To sum up all: If we must wholly perish, then is obedience to laws but an insensate servitude; rulers and magistrates are but the phantoms which popular imbecility has raised up; justice is an unwarrantable infringement upon the liberty of men,-an imposition, a usurpation; the law of marriage a vain scruple; modesty a prejudice; honor and probity, such stuff as dreams are made of: and incests, murders, parricides, the most heartless cruelties and the blackest crimes, are but the legitimate sports of man's irrepressible nature; while the harsh epithets attached to them are merely such as the policy of legislators has invented and imposed on the credulity of the people. Here is the issue to which the vaunted philosophy of unbelievers must inevitably lead. Here is that social felicity, that sway of reason, that emancipation from error, of which they eternally prate, as the fruit of their doctrines. Accept their maxims, and the whole world falls back into a frightful chaos. This is the conclusion which the philosophy of negation must accept at last. If these teachings are right, then obedience to law is an indefensible servitude; rulers and magistrates are despots, tolerated only by popular imbecility: justice is a denial of liberty; honor and truth are trivial rhapsodies: murder and perjury are derisive jests, and their harsh definitions are frivolous phrases invented by tyrants to impose upon the timidity of cowards and the credulity of slaves. This is the conclusion which the philosophy of negation must accept at last. Such is the felicity of those degrading precepts which make the epitaph the end. If these teachers are right, then we are atoms in a moral chaos. Charles Reade was quite as skilful an adapter as Disraeli or Ingalls. How many of his best things came out of his scrap-books we shall never know. But we do know that in "The Wandering Heir" he appropriated bodily a not inconsiderable fraction of Swift's "Polite Conversation." He was denounced by two anonymous writers, who afterwards proved to be an unsuccessful novelist and his wife. Whereupon he came out in a vigorous defence, and, having called his critics "anonymuncuia, pseudonymuncula, and skunkala” ambushed behind masked batteries, he proceeded to show that the transplanting of a few lines out of Swift, and the welding them with other topics in a homogeneous work, was not plagiarism, but one of every true inventor's processes, and that only an inventor could do it well,-an advanced theory, of course, but we pardon it for the delightful insouciance of its conceit. Reade was always full of charming excuses. When he was attacked for taking a French play by Alphonse Maquet and turning it, without acknowledgment, into the English "White Lies," he simply claimed that he had bought the idea from the original author, and was entitled to use it as he chose. Though this reply did not pacify his critics, we are not sure that it was not excellent good sense. If plagiarism is stealing, surely the thing alters its character when you purchase the property from the original owner. The compiler of an adequate "Curiosities of Plagiarism" would have to devote a special chapter to the Protean adventures of a novelette by Mme. Charles Reybaud. Let us relate them as curtly as possible. In 1883, Charles Reade published a story called "The Picture in my Uncle's Dining-Room." Then the fun began. One lynx-eyed detective found in a forgotten magazine a story called "The Old M'sieu's Secret," which was almost identical in plot and characters with Reade's story. Then another critic found another story in another forgotten magazine, entitled "Where Shall he Find Her?" (the title is curiously apt), which was also identical in essentials with Reade's story. Things became mixed. Both the forgotten stories were anonymous. Both were so like each other, and so like Reade's, that it was impossible they should have been written independently. At last the mystery was explained. All three, it was found, were adaptations or paraphrases from Mme. Reybaud's "Mlle. de Malepierre." Reade, indeed, had remodelled the story and deepened the dramatic interest, but the paternity was indisputable. Hardly had the smoke of the controversy died away in England when the war was carried into Germany, where one A. von Bosse published in Ueber Land und Meer a story entitled "Das Lebende Bild," which proved to be "Mlle. de Malepierre" again, in Teutonic dress. It was De Quincey who first pointed out that Coleridge's Hymn is a glorious paraphrase of a little-known poem by the German authoress Frederica Brunn, entitled "Chamouni at Sunrise." Here is the poem as translated by Charles T. Brooks in his "Songs and Ballads from the German Lyric Poets," Boston, 1842: From the deep shadow of the silent fir-grove I lift my eyes, and trembling look on thee, Brow of eternity, thou dazzling peak, From whose calm height my dreaming spirit mounts Who sank the pillar in the lap of earth, Down deep, the pillar of eternal rock, On which thy mass stands firm, and firm hath stood Who reared, up-towering through the vaulted blue, Who poured you from on high with thunder-sound, |