for not knowing how he got them. Above all, he insists on the proper
subordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea or
combination which, being produced by the sum total of the human race,
must belong to that multiple entity, from the accomplished lecturer or
populariser who transmits it, to the remotest generation of Fuegians or
Hottentots, however indifferent these may be to the superiority of their
right above that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic author.

Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowledgment were
brought home to him, would probably take a narrower ground of
explanation. It was a lapse of memory; or it did not occur to him as
necessary in this case to mention a name, the source being well
known--or (since this seems usually to act as a strong reason for
mention) he rather abstained from adducing the name because it might
injure the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure trade-mark
casts discredit on a good commodity, and even on the retailer who has
furnished himself from a quarter not likely to be esteemed first-rate.
No doubt this last is a genuine and frequent reason for the
non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as
well as personal sources: even an American editor of school classics
whose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of
the cheapest sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation for sound
learning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and
disguised his references to it under contractions in which _Us. Knowl._.
took the place of the low word _Penny_. Works of this convenient stamp,
easily obtained and well nourished with matter, are felt to be like rich
but unfashionable relations who are visited and received in privacy, and
whose capital is used or inherited without any ostentatious insistance
on their names and places of abode. As to memory, it is known that this
frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to