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The Zulus still believe that the souls of the dead reappear, like the soul of Plotinus, in the form of serpents. Plotinus wrote against the paganizing Christians, or Gnostics. Like all great men, he was accused of plagiarism. A defence of great men accused of literary theft would be as valuable as Naude''s work of a like name about magic. On his death the Delphic Oracle, in very second-rate hexameters, declared that Plotinus had become a demon.　(Andrew Lang, Letters on Literature)

Professor Hughes communicated his results to the Royal Society in the early part of 1878, and generously gave the microphone to the world. For his own sake it would perhaps have been better had he patented and thus protected it, for Mr. Edison, recognising it as a rival to his carbon-transmitter, then a valuable property, claimed it as an infringement of his patents and charged him with plagiarism. A spirited controversy arose, and several bitter lawsuits were the consequence, in none of which, however, Professor Hughes took part, as they were only commercial trials. It was clearly shown that Clerac, and not Edison, had been the first to utilise the variable resistance of powdered carbon or plumbage under pressure, a property on which the Edison transmitter was founded, and that Hughes had discovered a much wider principle, which embraced not only the so-called 'semi-conducting' bodies, such as carbon; but even the best conductors, such as gold, silver, and other metals. This principle was not a mere variation of electrical conductivity in a mass of material brought about by compression, but a mysterious variation in some unknown way of the strength of an electric current in traversing a loose joint or contact between two conductors. This discovery of Hughes really shed a light on the behaviour of Edison's own transmitter, whose action he had until then misunderstood. (J. Munro, Heroes of the Telegraph)

The Mormon Bible consists of fifteen "books" -- being the books of Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, Mosiah, Zeniff, Alma, Helaman, Ether, Moroni, two "books" of Mormon, and three of Nephi. In the first book of Nephi is a plagiarism of the Old Testament, which gives an account of the exodus from Jerusalem of the "children of Lehi"; and it goes on to tell of their wanderings in the wilderness, during eight years, and their supernatural protection by one of their number, a party by the name of Nephi. They finally reached the land of "Bountiful," and camped by the sea. After they had remained there "for the space of many days" -- which is more Scriptural than definite -- Nephi was commanded from on high to build a ship wherein to "carry the people across the waters." He travestied Noah's ark -- but he obeyed orders in the matter of the plan. (Mark Twain, Roughing It)

ALL men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen
it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt
Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so
"slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in
print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle -- keeping
awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely
translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper,
which he declares he found under a stone, in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason. The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James's translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel -- half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass" was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet. (Mark Twain, Roughing It, ch. 16)

Does the short-story writer felicitate himself upon having discovered a rare species in humanity's garden? The Blase Reader flips the pages between his fingers, yawns, stretches, and remarks to his wife:
"That's a clean lift from Kipling--or is it Conan Doyle? Anyway, I've read something just like it before. Say, kid, guess what these magazine guys get for a full page ad.? Nix. That's just like a woman. Three thousand straight. Fact."
To anticipate the delver into the past it may be stated that the plot of this one originally appeared in the Eternal Best Seller, under the heading, "He Asked You For Bread, and Ye Gave Him a Stone." There may be those who could not have traced my plagiarism to its source. Although the Book has had an unprecedentedly long run it is said to be less widely read than of yore. (Edna Farber, Buttered Side Down, ch. 7)

"The cupidity of mill-owners whose cruelties in the pursuit of gain have hardly been exceeded by those perpetrated by the Spaniards on the conquest of America in the pursuit of gold." John Wade, "History of the Middle and Working Classes," 3rd Ed. London, 1835, p. 114. The theoretical part of this book, a kind of hand-book of Political Economy, is, considering the time of its publication, original in some parts, e.g., on commercial crises. The theoretical part of this book, a kind of hand-book of Political Economy, is, considering the time of its publication, original in some parts, e.g., on commercial crises. The historical part is, to a great extent, a shameless plagiarism of Sir F. M. Eden's ``The State of the Poor," London, 1797. (Karl Marx, The Captal, note 31 )

"Here are the letters I've received from three top publishers of medical texts. Each one of them protests the plagiarism that a medical student told them your people have committed in preparing course material. "I went to the radiology lab after I received the first letter and talked to some students. Although no one wanted to admit to contacting the ublishers, they did show me the areas in their manual and notes that had been copied directly from different texts without citation.
   "They also showed me the notebooks filled with diagrams that had been copied from a published atlas. Again, nowhere in the book was there any mention of, or credit given, to the source. Hell, your guys didn't even get permission to photograph the material!"
   The dean continued telling Lyle that quite a sum of money would have to change hands with the publishers to keep this thing quiet.
   "It must be her," Lyle whined when he could get a word in. "She must have put the students up to writing the publishers." The dean knew who he meant. Lyle was a chronic complainer. "Did Trenchant put your boys up to plagiarism too?" ridiculed the dean. "I understood from you that she was no longer in the radiology course." (Ruth M. Sprague, Wild Justice)

ALCIONIO, PIETRO, or PETRUS ALCYONIUS (c. 1487-1527), Italian classical scholar, was born at Venice. After having studied Greek under Marcus Musurus of Candia, he was employed for some time by Aldus Manutius as a corrector of the press, and in 1522 was appointed professor of Greek at Florence through the influence of Giulio de' Medici. When his patron became pope in 1523 under the title of Clement VII., Alcionio followed him to Rome and remained there until his death. Alcionio published at Venice, in 1521, a Latin translation of several of the works of Aristotle, which was shown by the Spanish scholar Sepulveda to be very incorrect. He wrote a dialogue entitled Medices Legatus, sive de Exilio (1522), in connexion with which he was charged with plagiarism by his personal enemy, Paulus Manutius. The accusation, which Tiraboschi has shown to be groundless, was that he had taken the finest passages in the work from Cicero's lost treatise De Gloria, and had then destroyed the only existing copy of the original in order to escape detection. His contemporaries speak very unfavourably of Alcionio, and accuse him of haughtiness, uncouth manners, vanity and licentiousness.

This law," adds Liebig, "was first enunciated by John Stuart Mill in his 'Principles of Pol. Econ.,Vol. 1, p. 17, as follows: 'That the produce of land increases, caeteris paribus, in a diminishing ratio to the increase of the labourers employed' (Mill here introduces in an erroneous form the law enunciated by Ricardo's school, for since the 'decrease of the labourers employed,kept even pace in England with the advance of agriculture, the law discovered in, and applied to, England, could have no application to that country, at all events), 'is the universal law of agricultural industry.This is very remarkable, since Mill was ignorant of the reason for this taw." (Liebig, l. c., Bd. I., p. 143 and Note.) Apart from Liebig's wrong interpretation of the word "labour," by which word he understands something quite different from what Political Economy does, it is, in any case, "very remarkable" that he should make Mr. John Stuart Mill the first propounder of a theory which was first published by James Anderson in A. Smith's days, and was repeated in various works down to the beginning of the 19th century; a theory which Malthus, that master in plagiarism (the whole of his population theory is a shameless plagiarism), appropriated to himself in 1815; which West developed at the same time as, and independently of, Anderson; which in the year 1817 was connected by Ricardo with the general theory of value, then made the round of the world as Ricardo's theory, and in 1820 was vulgarised by James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill; and which, finally, was reproduced by John Stuart Mill and others, as a dogma already quite commonplace, and known to every schoolboy. It cannot be denied that John Stuart Mill owes his, at all events, "remarkable" authority almost entirely to such quid-pro-quos. (Karl Marx, The Capital, ch. 15)

In the good old days authors were in fact a despised and neglected class. The Greeks put them to death, as the humor seized them. For a hundred years after his death Shakespeare was practically unknown to his countrymen, except Suckling and his coterie: during his life he was roundly assailed by his contemporaries, one of the latter going to the extreme of denouncing him as a daw that strutted in borrowed plumage. Milton was accused of plagiarism, and one of his critics devoted many years to compiling from every quarter passages in ancient works which bore a similarity to the blind poet's verses. Even Samuel Johnson's satire of ``was pronounced a plagiarism. The good old days were the days, seemingly, when the critics had their way and ran things with a high hand; they made or unmade books and authors. They killed Chatterton, just as, some years later, they hastened the death of Keats. For a time they were all-powerful. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that these professional tyrants began to lose their grip, and when Byron took up the lance against them their doom was
practically sealed.
Who would care a picayune in these degenerate days what Dr. Warburton said pro or con a book? It was Warburton (then Bishop of Gloucester) who remarked of Granger's ``Biographical History of England'' that it was ``an odd one. This was as high a compliment as he ever paid a book; those which he did not like he called sad books, and those which he fancied he called odd ones.
The truth seems to be that through the diffusion of knowledge and the multiplicity and cheapness of books people generally have reached the point in intelligence where they feel warranted in asserting their ability to judge for themselves. So the occupation of the critic, as interpreted and practised of old, is gone. (Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac)

By suffering himself to be applauded for what he [Calas] has not performed, by assuming a merit which does not belong to him, he feels that he is guilty of a mean falsehood, and deserves, not the admiration, but the contempt of those very persons who, by mistake, had been led to admire him. It may, perhaps, give him some well-founded pleasure to find that he has been, by many people, thought capable of performing what he did not perform. But, though he may be obliged to his friends for their good opinion, he would think himself guilty of the greatest baseness if he did not immediately undeceive them. It gives him little pleasure to look upon himself in the light in which other people actually look upon him, when he is conscious that, if they knew the truth, they would look upon him in a very different light. A weak man, however, is often much delighted with viewing himself in this false and delusive light. He assumes the merit of every laudable action that is ascribed to him, and pretends to that of many which nobody ever thought of ascribing to him. He pretends to have done what he never did, to have written what another wrote, to have invented what another discovered; and is led into all the miserable vices of plagiarism and common lying. (Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments)

The booksellers will unite against works, and their proprietors. Against works, by refusing to push their sale, by replacing them with poor imitations, by reproducing them in a hundred indirect ways; and no one knows how far the science of plagiarism, and skilful imitation may be carried. Against proprietors. (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?)

The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake, is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and sharp the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling. 'Great inventors in all ages knew this - Michael Angelo and Albert Durer are known by this and by this alone'; and another time he wrote, with all the simple directness of nineteenth-century prose, 'to generalise is to be an idiot.And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies at the base of all noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to the colourless and empty abstractions of our own eighteenth-century poets and of the classical dramatists of France, or of the vague spiritualities of the German sentimental school: opposed, too, to that spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower itself of the great Revolution, underlying the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to the eaglelike flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy, though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day, bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford, the school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of transcendentalism alien to the spirit of art. For the artist can accept no sphere of life in exchange for life itself. For him there is no escape from the bondage of the earth [. . .]. (Oscar Wilde, “The English Renaissance of Art”)

They decided at first that they would call themselves the Naval Mr. O's, a plagiarism, and not perhaps a very good one, from the title of the well-known troupe of "Scarlet Mr. E's," and Bert rather clung to the idea of a uniform of bright blue serge, with a lot of gold lace and cord and ornamentation, rather like a naval officer's, but more so. But that had to be abandoned as impracticable, it would have taken too much time and money to prepare. (H. G. Wells, The War in the Air)

`Nay, what is it?he said, dropping into his most caressing and confidential tone - the one, he well knew, that few could resist. `Is - is there any need of a son in thy family? Speak freely, for we priests-- That last was a direct plagiarism from a fakir by the Taksali Gate. `We priests! Thou art not yet old enough to--She checked the joke with another laugh. `Believe me, now and again, we women, O priest, think of other matters than sons. Moreover, my daughter has borne her man-child.Two arrows in the quiver are better than one; and three are better still.Kim quoted the proverb with a meditative cough, looking discreetly earthward. (Rudyard Kipling, Kim)

From the
arts of pleasure he led the young priest at once to those of his
mysterious wisdom. He bared to his amazed eyes the initiatory
secrets of the sombre philosophy of the Nile- those secrets plucked
from the stars, and the wild chemistry, which, in those days, when
Reason herself was but the creature of Imagination, might well pass
for the lore of a diviner magic. He seemed to the young eyes of the
priest as a being above mortality, and endowed with supernatural
gifts. That yearning and intense desire for the knowledge which is not
of earth- which had burned from his boyhood in the heart of the
priest- was dazzled, until it confused and mastered his clearer sense.
He gave himself to the art which thus addressed at once the two
strongest of human passions, that of pleasure and that of knowledge.
He was loth to believe that one so wise could err, that one so lofty
could stoop to deceive. Entangled in the dark web of metaphysical
moralities, he caught at the excuse by which the Egyptian converted
vice into a virtue. His pride was insensibly flattered that Arbaces
had deigned to rank him with himself, to set him apart from the laws
which bound the vulgar, to make him an august participator, both in
the mystic studies and the magic fascinations of the Egyptian's
solitude. The pure and stern lessons of that creed to which Olinthus
had sought to make him convert, were swept away from his memory by the
deluge of new passions. And the Egyptian, who was versed in the
articles of that true faith, and who soon learned from his pupil the
effect which had been produced upon him by its believers, sought,
not unskilfully, to undo that effect, by a tone of reasoning,
half-sarcastic and half-earnest.
'This faith,said he, 'is but a borrowed plagiarism from one of
the many allegories invented by our priests of old. 'Observe,he
added, pointing to a hieroglyphical scroll- 'observe in these
ancient figures the origin of the Christian's Trinity. Here are also
three gods- the Deity, the Spirit, and the Son. Observe, that the
epithet of the Son is "Saviour"- observe, that the sign by which his
human qualities are denoted is the cross.Note here, too, the
mystic history of Osiris, how he put on death; how he lay in the
grave; and how, thus fulfilling a solemn atonement, he rose again from
the dead! In these stories we but design to paint an allegory from the
operations of nature and the evolutions of the eternal heavens. But
the allegory unknown, the types themselves have furnished to credulous
nations the materials of many creeds. (Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii)

MILTON, ON THE REPROACH OF PLAGIARISM AGAINST

   SOME people have accused Milton of having taken his poem from the tragedy of "The Banishment of Adam " by Grotius, and from the " Sarcotis " of the Jesuit Masenius, printed at Cologne in 1654 and in 1661, long before Milton gave his " Paradise Lost."
   As regards Grotius, it was well enough known in England that Milton had carried into his epic English poem a few Latin verses from the tragedy of" Adam." It is in no wise to be a plagiarist to enrich language with the beauties of a foreign language. No one accused Euripides of plagiarism for having imitated in one of the choruses of "Iphigenia" the second book of the Iliad; on the contrary, people were very grateful to him for this imitation, which they regarded as a homage rendered to Homer on the Athenianstage.
   Virgil never suffered a reproach for having happily imitated, in the Aeneid, a hundred verses by the first of Greek poets.
   Against Milton the accusation was pushed a little further. A Scot, Will Lauder by name, very attached to the memory of Charles I., whom Milton had insulted with the most uncouth animosity, thought himself entitled to dishonour the memory of this monarch's accuser. It was claimed that Milton was guilty of an infamous imposture in robbing Charles I. of the sad glory of being the author of the " Eikon Basilika," a book long dear to the royalists, and which Charles I., it was said, had composed in his prison to serve as consolation for his deplorable adversity.
   Lauder, therefore, about the year of 1752, wanted to begin by proving that Milton was only a plagiarist, before proving that he had acted as a forger against the memory of the most unfortunate of kings; he procured some editions of the poem of the "Sarcotis." It seemed evident that Milton had imitated some passages of it, as he bad imitated Grotius and Tasso.
   But Lauder did not rest content there; he unearthed a bad translation in Latin verse of the " Paradise Lost " of the English poet; and joining several verses of this translation to those by Masenius, he thought thereby to render the accusation more grave, and Milton's shame more complete. It was in that, that he was badly deceived; his fraud was discovered. He wanted to make Milton pass for a forger, and he was himself convicted of forging. No one examined Masenius' poem of which at that time there were only a few copies in Europe. All England, convinced of the Scot's poor trick, asked no more about it. The accuser, confounded, was obliged to disavow his manoeuvre, and ask pardon for it.
   Since then a new edition of Masenius was printed in 1757. The literary public was surprised at the large number of very beautiful verses with which the Sarcotis was sprinkled. It is in truth nothing but a long declamation of the schools on the fall of man: but the exordium, the invocation, the description of the garden of Eden, the portrait of Eve, that of the devil, are precisely the same as in Milton. Further, it is the same subject, the same plot, the same catastrophe. If the devil wishes, in Milton, to be revenged on man for the harm which God has done him, he has precisely the same plan in the work of the Jesuit Masenius; and he manifests it in verses worthy maybe of the century of Augustus (Sarcotis," I., 271 et seq.)
   One finds in both Masenius and Milton little episodes, trifling digressions which are absolutely alike; both speak of Xerxes who covered the sea with his ships. Both speak in the same tone of the Tower of Babel; both give the same description of luxury, of pride, of avarice, of gluttony.
   What most persuaded the generality of readers of Milton's plagiarism was the perfect resemblance of the beginning of the two poems. Many foreigners, after reading the exordium, had no doubt but that the rest of Milton's poem was taken from Masenius. It is a very great error, and easy to recognize.
   I do not think that the English poet imitated in all more than two hundred of the Jesuit of Cologne's verses; and I dare say that he imitated only what was worthy of being imitated. These two hundred verses are very beautiful; so are Milton's; and the total of Masenius' poem, despite these two hundred beautiful verses, is not worth anything at all.
   Moliere took two whole scenes from the ridiculous comedy of the "Pedant Joue" by Cyrano de Bergerac. "These two scenes are good," he said as he was jesting with his friends. "They belong to me by right: I recover my property." After that anyone who treated the author of Tartufe " and " Le Misanthrope" as a plagiarist would have been very badly received.
   It is certain that generally Milton, in his " Paradise ", has in imitating flown on his own wings; and it must be agreed that if he borrowed so many traits from Grotius and from the Jesuit of Cologne, they are blended in the crowd of original things which are his; in England he is always regarded as a very great poet.
   It is true that he should have avowed having translated two hundred of a Jesuit's verses; but in his time, at the court of Charles II., people did not worry themselves with either the Jesuits, or Milton, or "Paradise Lost", or "Paradise Regained". All those things were either scoffed at, or unknown. (Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary)