Several of Shakespeare’s plays were based by him on plays of earlier date, by other authors. Dryden borrowed freely from Spanish plays and sometimes from Corneille and Molière,--a fact which caused Scott to remark (Preface to “The Assignation”) that “originality consists in the mode of treating a subject more than in the subject itself.” English dramatists, from Wycherly onward, have freely borrowed from Molière. Fielding, there is reason to believe, derived an occasional hint from the great Frenchman, as also from Thomas Murphy. Goldsmith was a little indebted to Wycherly. Hoadley borrowed from Farquhar; Steele from Bickerstaff; Colman from Murphy; Sheridan from both Wycherly and Congreve, and perhaps from his mother’s play of “The Discovery” and her novel of “Sydney Biddulph”; Boucicault from many French sources and some English ones. I would not be understood as approving or defending that practice in dramatic authorship: on the contrary, in the whole course of my long service as a dramatic critic and historian I have condemned it. These words, written by me many years ago, relative to Boucicault, indicate my view of _the practice_: Dramatic authorship, indeed, seems to have been regarded by him,--and by many other playwriters,--as a species by itself, exempt from obligation to moral law. The bard who should “convey” Milton’s “Lycidas” or Wordsworth’s great “Ode,” and, after making a few changes in the text and introducing a few new lines, publish it as a composition “original” with himself, would be deemed and designated a literary thief. The dramatist, taking his plots from any convenient source and rehashing incidents and speeches selected from old plays, can publish the fabric thus constructed as an “original drama,” and, so far from being discredited, can obtain reputation and profit by that proceeding. [“Old Friends,” by W. W.: 1909.]