One of the most eminent platform orators of the time has treated the habit of borrowing, in literature, in a most interesting manner. "Take," he said, "the stories of Shakespeare, who has, perhaps, written his forty-odd plays. Some are historical. The rest, two thirds of them, he did not stop to invent, but he found them. These he clutched, ready-made to his hand, from the Italian novelists, who had taken them before from the East. Cinderella and her Slipper is older than all history, like half a dozen other baby legends. The annals of the world do not go back far enough to tell us from where they first came. Bulwer borrowed the incidents of his Roman stories from legends of a thousand years before. Indeed, Dunloch, who has grouped the history of the novels of all Europe into one essay, says that in the nations of modern Europe there have been two hundred and fifty or three hundred distinct stories. He says at least two hundred of these may be traced, before Christianity, to the other side of the Black Sea. Even our newspaper jokes are enjoying a very respectable old age. Take Maria Edgeworth's essay on Irish bulls and the laughable mistakes of the Irish. The tale which Maria Edgeworth or her father thought the best is that famous story of a man writing a letter as follows: 'My dear friend, I would write you more in detail, more minutely, if there was not an impudent fellow looking over my shoulder reading every word.' ('No, you lie; I've not read a word you have written!') This is an Irish bull, still it is a very old one. It is only two hundred and fifty years older than the New Testament. Horace Walpole dissented from Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and thought the other Irish bull was the best--of the man who said, 'I would have been a very handsome man, but they changed me in the cradle.' That comes from Don Quixote, and is Spanish; but Cervantes borrowed it from the Greek in the fourth century, and the Greeks stole it from the Egyptians hundreds of years back. There is one story which it is said Washington has related of a man who went into an inn and asked for a glass of drink from the landlord, who pushed forward a wine-glass about half the usual size. The landlord said, 'That glass out of which you are drinking is forty years old.' 'Well,' said the thirsty traveler, contemplating its minute proportions, 'I think it is the smallest thing of its age I ever saw.' [The same story is told of Foote. Dining while in Paris with Lord Stormont, that thrifty Scotch peer, then ambassador, as usual produced his wine in the smallest of decanters, and dispensed it in the smallest of glasses, enlarging all the time on its exquisite growth and enormous age. "It is very little of its age," said Foote, holding up his diminutive glass.] That story as told is given as a story of Athens three hundred and seventy-five years before Christ was born. Why, all these Irish bulls are Greek--every one of them. Take the