In my boyhood there was a storm in a teacup over a case of supposed plagiarism in connection with the Lucile of Robert Lytton. I am afraid that these names rouse little echo in latter-day bosoms, but Lucile was a long narrative-poem, a sort of epic of society, which enjoyed an extraordinary vogue in those far-away times. In the midst of its popularity somebody discovered that its plot closely resembled that of George Sand's novel, Lavinia. Why it should not do so, I fail to see, but the howl of 'plagiary' resounded, and the Lyttons were much affected. The father of the poet, the great Bulwer himself, stoutly defended his son in terms that did not lack courage. 'Borrowing is a beauty,' said the author of Pelham, 'which can't be done too largely.'

This, I think, was a rash statement, but Robert Lytton almost immediately acted upon it in the preparation of a volume called Serbski Pesme, for which he was fiercely dragged over the coals of criticism. Bulwer was more prudent when he wrote, "The sole condition of borrowing is to improve what you take.' Undoubtedly much caution as well as tact is required to justify these pretty loans, and for ordinary mortals the adventure is best left untried.

The really serious form of plagiarism, however, is the verbal, and for this there seems to be no valid excuse whatever. The indolence of an author tempts him to borrow a sentence or a phrase that may particularly suit him, but it is at best a very dangerous indulgence. Oddly enough, it is often the rich who show the greatest hardihood in robbery, like Coleridge, whose transferences from German philosophical writers have been the subject of severe animadversion. In this case, no doubt, inherent intellectual laziness explains the paradox that one who was preeminently wealthy should slip his

fingers into the pockets of the poor. Coleridge, with his eagle vision piercing the mysteries of metaphysics, had no need to borrow from anyone, but the congenital indolence that weighed upon him, joined to the impotence of opium, tempted him to use words that happened to match with his meditation, and he fell.

Many years ago I was the amused victim of a queer case of plagiarism. A gentleman, long since dead, published, as old gentlemen will, his reminiscences. In the course of them he narrated an experience, which he said had happened to himself, but which agreed, word for word, with a whole page in an earlier book of mine. I was not aware of this until a correspondent pointed it out in the Times, and asked for an explanation. After some little delay, the autobiographer confessed that he had read my book, and that he must have copied the passage into a notebook when he was collecting his personal recollections. He said that in preparing his book for the press he must have overlooked the fact that the page in question did not belong to him. The excuse

was strange, but I have no doubt that it was given in good faith. The memory of elderly autobiographers does play them strange tricks.

It is remarkable how long sustained verbal plagiarism will remain undetected. We are left with the impression that nobody reads a book with any very clear recollection of any other book. How else are we to explain the fact that the romance of John Inglesant had been the favorite of thousands of readers for forty-five years before anyone discovered that it was largely 'beautified' with the feathers of seventeenth-century high-flyers? In such a case it cannot be pretended that the plagiary has injured anyone. As long as the thefts remained undetected, Shorthouse was justified by the pleasure his amalgam gave to an unsuspecting audience. When once the damning fact has been made public, some of the gilt is unquestionably off the gingerbread. But I think that John Inglesant may continue to be, if not exactly 'hot in the mouth,' an agreeable fruit-salad of piety and adventure.

But the classic instance of the unblushing verbal plagiary is Sterne, whose audacity in borrowing, or rather stealing, takes our breath away. But here again we meet with the curious circumstance that, among the thousands of readers, many of them hostile, who studied Tristram Shandy, it was a very long time before anyone noticed the author's depredations. It was not until thirty years after his death that his thefts were exposed.

In 1798 a Manchester physician, Dr. John Ferriar, published an amusing little book called Illustrations of Sterne, in which he pursued the criminal through folio upon folio. Dr. Ferriar had something of Burton in his disposition, and his knowledge of obscure mediæval literature was quite amazing. Wherever he gleaned it seemed to him

that Sterne had been reaping before him, and his volume is a repertory of Sterne's thefts.

It has been remarked by those who have only heard of Ferriar's criticism that it is an attack on the guilty Tristram. It is not; Ferriar is indulgent to a fault, and apologizes to the shade of Sterne for pursuing him 'through miry ways of antic wit and quibbling mazes drear,' while he asserts that the figures of the two great novels 'fix' Sterne 'conspicuous on the shrine of glory.' But, with all his admiration, Ferriar 'unbolsters' the novelist of a strange mass of padding that is the property of other people.

Between 1757 and 1760, when Sterne had reached middle life and was beginning to think about authorship, there is evidence that he plunged into a course of severe and eccentric study. His time was divided between Hall-Stevenson's Crazy Castle and his own vicarage of Sutton-in-the-Forest. At each of these places he had access to a library stocked with the learned lumber of the Renaissance, together with such accredited works as those of Rabelais, Montaigne, and Burton. Every friend of Mr. Walter Shandy remembers how fond he was of Bouchet and Bruscambille and Béralde.

When Sterne improves on his original, there can be little room for censure. He has been specially blamed for stealing the Lady Baussière episode from Burton, and the case is, indeed, one of sheer highway robbery. Still it is impossible not to admit that Sterne tells Burton's story rather better than Burton told it. That Sterne, in the 'Fragment on Whiskers,' while stealing word for word a long piece from the Anatomy of Melancholy, should in the same breath gravely denounce the crime of plagiarism may leave us gasping, but after all, if you are a thief, it is best to be a bold one.

CHARLES MONTAGU DOUGHTY, whose death, in his eighty-third year, took place in January, was one of the great men of our day, the author of a unique prose masterpiece, as well as of many volumes of poetry that in some quarters are almost as highly esteemed. Wilfrid Blunt, whose own journeys in Arabia qualified him to pass judgment, was in the habit of declaring that he would rather have written Travels in Arabia Deserta than any other prose work of the nineteenth century. For many readers, here and in America, it is a book so majestic, so vital, of such incomparable beauty of thought, of observation, and of diction, as to occupy a place apart among their most cherished literary possessions- and this often after it has been begun with indulgence and continued with irritation, until, the magic of the style being felt and understood, the subsequent steps have brought nothing but absorbed enthusiasm and delight.

Doughty was born in August 1843, the second of the two sons of the Reverend Charles Montagu Doughty, of Theberton Hall, Suffolk, and Frederica, daughter of the Honorable and Reverend Frederick Hotham, prebendary of Rochester and rector of Dennington. His mother died when he was born, his father when he was five years old, and he was sent to school at Laleham and Elstree, passing the holidays at Woodbridge with an unsympathetic uncle, who was the guardian of the two boys.

1 From the Observer (London Moderate Sunday paper), January 31

His much-loved brother, two years his senior, entered the navy, but left it and went to the Bar, where he practised until he married and settled on the family estate as a country squire, devoted to horses and dogs.

In

A stammer prevented Doughty from following his brother's first profession. He was rejected after a course at the naval school at Portsmouth, and was placed in the care of a tutor, with whom he made some tours in France. 1861 he went up to Caius College, Cambridge. He was then, as all through life, shy and retiring, and, having but a limited sense of humor, was misunderstood by most of his fellow undergraduates, among whom he made few friends. He was invalided for a year, which he spent in Norway, and then came back to Caius, but finding it rather shut in, and disliking compulsory lectures, he migrated to Downing, where he was allowed more freedom, and delighted in the large shady garden. Among his companions were Henn Collins, afterward Lord Justice Collins, and Ray Lankester. Long afterward, one of his examiners, Dr. Bonney, said that it was because Doughty 'had such a disheveled mind' that he could not give him a first in the then recently established Natural Science Tripos. He was, however, devoted to science, and during numerous geological excursions in Suffolk and round Cambridge he made a large collection of fossils.

A distinguished member of the sister university, now adorning Cambridge,

has saucily declared that he finds it 'an asylum in every sense of the term.' The shy dreamer Doughty may have had similar feelings about the Cambridge of the early sixties. But when he went down it was with scholarly habits and inclinations which he fostered all his life. He spent a year at Oxford, reading in the Bodleian, and then he studied in Leyden and Louvain for a year and a half. After that he traveled in France, Spain, Greece (spending nine months in Athens), Algeria, and Tunis. He was also for several years in Italy before residing in Damascus and other parts of Syria, where he passed two or three years in the study of Arabic, and made expeditions through Palestine and in Egypt and the Sinai peninsula, leading up to his great adventure.

The wanderings in Arabia, which are described with such magnanimity and vividness in his marvelous book, were to a large extent involuntary. Desiring to make rubbings of some inscriptions at Medain Salih, a three weeks' march from Damascus, he got leave in November 1876 to attach himself to the Mekka pilgrimage, intending to rejoin it on its return journey. But hearing of other inscriptions at a distance from those he had rubbed, he allowed it to return without him; and not being master of his movements while he was dependent on the hospitality and the necessities or caprice of the Bedouins with whom he traveled or resided, he had to endure for a matter of nearly two years being tossed from desert camp to camp before he finally arrived at Jidda, and found safety and release.

In these travels, which included sojourns at Tema, Haïl, and other towns, he consistently proclaimed himself to be a Christian, and ran some extreme risks. But his dignity, his helplessness, and his transparent sincerity always gained him friends and defenders in his

direst straits. Moreover, he practised medicine, and with simple remedies cured the sick and won their hearts. All but penniless, he often lived on the charity of wanderers nearly as indigent as himself. He thus got to know them, both the men and the womenfolk, with an intimacy that is utterly denied to the wealthy traveler, and that has probably been permitted to no other European. The notebooks in which he recorded their conversations, their customs, their virtues, and their defects, as well as the aspect of unknown Arabia, are now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Part of a folio copy of his favorite Chaucer was a great solace during those months of isolation. This and all the other contents of his camel-bags came home with him. That nothing was lost or stolen that was not sooner or later restored by his nomad hosts says much for their sense of what was due to a defenseless stranger in their midst.

It was in August 1878 that these perils ended. His health was broken, but, having rested and recruited somewhat, he set to work to compile the two thick volumes that came from the Cambridge University Press ten years later. During this time-September 1883 - he delivered an address before the Royal Geographical Society, which was received with indifference by a slender audience. And, with Renan's help, his Documents Epigraphiques were printed in 1884 in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum.

While writing Arabia Deserta it is said that Doughty made a resolution to use no books that contained words that were not in Chaucer or Spenser. The work that he studied most assiduously was Hakluyt's Voyages. Hence the antique style, which has been a stumbling block to many. Robertson Smith did his best to ease it, but Doughty was wisely adamant, and

would have no correcting from outside. On the other hand, he rewrote voluminously in proof, and drove the press to despair. Laboring incessantly, he brought his work at last to a finish, having packed into it every single word that he had it in him to say. When, thirty-three years later, it was reprinted in extenso, he could only add or omit a comma. But the price was three guineas, at that day unheard of and prohibitive, and the sale was very slow. In spite of enthusiastic recognition here and there, William Morris and Burne-Jones were ardent admirers, -it was not for another twenty years, when Edward Garnett edited an abridgment for the firm of Duckworth, that Doughty's fame began. It has since grown steadily, and editions of the complete work published by Jonathan Cape have found a ready sale, first at nine guineas, with an introduction by Colonel T. E. Lawrence, Doughty's greatest follower, and subsequently at the original price, at which it is now obtainable. The first edition can hardly be met with at any price. There is no space in this article for a survey of Doughty's large poetical output. The Dawn in Britain, in six volumes, appeared in 1906, Adam Cast Forth in 1908, The Cliffs in 1909, The Clouds in 1912, The Titans in 1916, and Mansoul, or the Riddle of the World in 1920. On the writing and rewriting of this final book, which appeared in a revised form in 1923, its author spent the last nine years of his life. He set

great store by it. It contains many passages of arresting beauty, but the use of Spenserian phraseology has limited its appeal.

In person Doughty was very tall, upright, stately, with thick, reddish hair and beard, and an expression of great nobility, like that of a prophet of old. His courtesy, humility, and gentleness were also of another age. He avoided company and publicity of any kind, but was gratified to receive doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge, to be made Honorary Fellow of Caius College, and honorary member of the British Academy. He lived for a while at Alassio and for many years at Eastbourne, where his health, undermined by his privations, was largely restored. About three years ago he moved to Sissinghurst, near Cranbrook, where he died. A week before the end his bed was moved to his study so that his eyes might rest on his beloved books. He married in 1886 Caroline Amelia, daughter of General Sir Montagu McMurdo, K.C.B., who, with the two daughters who have shared her devoted care of their father and have long preserved his life, survives him. Many times in Arabia he seemed about to lose it. To a fanatical assailant who shouted, 'Dreadest thou not to die?' he returned the brave answer, 'I have not so lived, Moslem, that I must fear to die.' Little did the weary man then think that he had nearly half a century of life before him.

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