If the large majority of dramatic authors,--Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Molière, Sheridan, and the rest, down to the present day,--be convicted of plagiarism on the ground that they have rehashed old material, that charge will stand against Belasco. But the dramatist who, with manifest truth, pleads, as Belasco can plead (and as I understand that he does plead), “a well-known, universal, recognized custom” cannot, justly, be singled out and stigmatized for plagiarism,--any more than a respectable Turk, resident in Constantinople, with four wives, can be singled out and stigmatized for bigamy. I no more approve the custom of what I call “playwrighting” than I approve or advocate polygamy,--but I speak for justice. Moreover, it is essential to be remembered that the number of basic situations, in fiction as in fact, is limited, and consideration of _the method_ of combining and treating them must vitally affect the question of “originality.” To make an avowed adaptation of the work of another, or, with credit, to base a passage on suggestion derived from an incident in the work of another is not plagiarism. The fair investigator of the charge of plagiarism against Belasco will find that it is twofold: it accuses him of appropriation from the works of other writers precedent to him, and of appropriation from other writers contemporary with him to whose writings he has had, or, as alleged, may have had, access. CHARLES READE ON PLAGIARISM. In considering the first part of the accusation I would recommend all inquirers to read the masterly exposition of the subject of Plagiarism made by Charles Reade (himself one of the successful writers frequently, in his day, accused of the offence), which is printed, in his collected Works, as an appendix to his capital story of “The Wandering Heir,”--a story first made public in dramatic form. That exposition is too long to be quoted here in full, but the appended extract from it, which deals with what Reade calls “the mere intellectual detraction” involved in the charge that he had stolen “The Wandering Heir” from Dean Swift’s “The Journal of a Modern Lady,” is illuminative: “It [‘the mere intellectual detraction’] is founded on two things--1. The sham-sample swindle, which I have defined. 2. On a pardonable blunder. “The blunder is one into which many criticasters of my day have fallen; but a critic knows there is a vital distinction between taking ideas from a _homogeneous_ source and from a _heterogeneous_ source, and that only the first mentioned of these two acts is plagiarism; the latter is more like jewel-setting. Call it what you will, it is not plagiarism. “I will take the fraud and the blunder in order and illustrate them by a few examples, out of thousands.