Nor, I
think, can there be much question as to its moral complexion. For the
pilferings from Bishop Hall, at any rate, no shadow of excuse can,
so far as I can see, be alleged. Sterne could not possibly plead any
better justification for borrowing Hall's thoughts and phrases and
passing them off upon his hearers or readers as original, than
he could plead for claiming the authorship of one of the Bishop's
benevolent actions and representing himself to the world as the doer
of the good deed. In the actual as in the hypothetical case there is
a dishonest appropriation by one man of the credit--in the former
case the intellectual, in the latter the moral credit--belonging to
another: the offence in the actual case being aggravated by the fact
that it involves a fraud upon the purchaser of the sermon, who pays
money for what he may already have in his library. The plagiarisms
from Burton stand upon a slightly different though not, I think, a
much more defensible footing. For in this case it has been urged
that Sterne, being desirous of satirizing pedantry, was justified in
resorting to the actually existent writings of an antique pedant of
real life; and that since Mr.
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