The treatment also of the subjects has some apparent similitude; but in looking all through the book, it is strange that not one line, not one phrase, is the same as any of mine.

Travelling on the same road, and in somewhat of the same proverbial rhythm, this is very curious; whilst it certainly acquits me of even unintended and unconscious plagiarism.

The headings begin of God, of Heaven, of Angels, &c.,--and then of vertue, of peace, of truth, &c., and afterwards of love, of jealousie, of hate, of beauty, of flattery, &c., &c.,--all being aphoristic quotations from ancient authors.

As before stated, the whole was unseen by me until nearly thirty years after I had published my independent essays on the same theses much in a similar key." This is a parallel case to the recent statement in a printed book with characteristic illustrations respecting the non-originality of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; and Milton's Paradise Lost has been similarly disparaged, Mr.Plummer Ward having written and shown to me a pamphlet by himself to prove that some Italian poem seen by Milton in youth preceded him on the same lines;--while Mr.Geikie quotes from the Anglo-Saxon Caedmon papers nearly identical with some in Paradise Lost.
But there is no end to assertions of this sort, impugning authorial honesty and originality: when authors write on the same topics and with much the same stock of words and ideas both religious and educational, it is only a marvel that the thoughts and writings of men do not oftener collide, and seem to be plagiaristic reproductions.

I have spoken of all this at length, that if any one hereafter finds this "Politeuphuia" in the British Museum (which is welcome to have my copy if it lacks one), and years hence accuses my innocence of having stolen from it, he may know that I have thus taken the bull by the horns and twisted him over.
The last anecdote I shall now inflict upon my reader in this connection is as follows:-- One James Orton, an American gentleman whom I have never seen that I know of (unless by possibility in some one of the crowds met anonymously, before whom I may have read in public) was kind enough many years ago to publish a beautifully printed and illustrated volume "The Proverbialist and the Poet," whereof he sent me two copies; but lacking his address, probably with the delicate object of preventing an acknowledgment; and I am almost ashamed to state that his whole book in different inks combines the threefold wisdoms of King Solomon, William Shakespeare, and Martin Tupper; the title-page being decorated in colours with views of the Temple, Stratford-on-Avon, and Albury House! If I ventured to quote the Preface, it would beat even this as the climax of fulsome flattery, and I think that my friends of the Comic Press who have done me so much service by keeping up my shuttlecock with their battledores, and so much honour by placing me prominently among the defamed worthies of the world, would in their charity (for they have some) pity the victim of such excruciating praise, if he failed hereby to repudiate it.
Not but that poor human nature delights in adulation.