“It is an old trick of Detraction,” says Moore, in his “Life of Sheridan,” “and one of which it never tires, to father the works of eminent writers upon others; or, at least, while it kindly leaves an author the credit for his worst performances, to find some one in the background to ease him of the fame of his best.... Indeed, if mankind were to be influenced by those _Qui tam_ critics... Aristotle must refund to one Ocellus Lucanus, Virgil must make a _cessio bonorum_ in favor of Pisander, the Metamorphoses of Ovid must be credited to the account of Parthenius of Nicæa, and Sheridan... must surrender the glory of having written ‘The School for Scandal’ to a certain anonymous young lady who died of a consumption in Thames Street.... Sheridan had, in addition to the resources of his own wit, a quick apprehension of what suited his purpose in the wit of others, and a power of enriching whatever he adopted from them with such new graces as gave him a sort of claim of paternity over it and made it all his own. ‘_C’est mon_ _bien_,’ said Molière, when accused of borrowing, ‘_et je le reprens partout où je le trouve_.’” THE “TRICK” AS APPLIED. “Plagiarism,” says The Dictionary, is “the act of appropriating _the ideas_ or the language of another and passing them for one’s [_sic!_] own; literary theft.” It would not be very difficult, testing Belasco’s plays by that definition, and excluding all other considerations, to invest the charge of plagiarism against him, in some instances, with validity. The last part of “Hearts of Oak” is borrowed from Leslie’s “The Mariner’s Compass”; “La Belle Russe” is based on situations taken from “Forget Me Not” and “The New Magdalen”; the thrilling situation in the Third Act of “The Girl I Left Behind Me” is based on a similar situation in Boucicault’s “Jessie Brown; or, the Relief of Lucknow”; the agonizing situation in the Third Act of “The Darling of the Gods,” in which a military despot extorts information from a woman by forcing her to gaze on her lover subjected to torture, is derived (and bettered) from Sardou’s “La Tosca.” Other instances of similarity could be specified. It would, however, be a manifest injustice to stigmatize Belasco, _and only Belasco_, as a plagiarist on the [Illustration: Photograph by Count Jean de Strelecki. Belasco’s Collection. “THE STUDENT”--DAVID BELASCO] ground of his indebtedness to plays earlier than his. He has done only what all other dramatists have done since the beginning of the craft; that is, he has based _some_ of his plays on dramatic expedients and situations that have long been considered to be common property. AN ANCIENT USAGE.