Salmagundi; or, The whim-whams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, esq. [pseud.] and others. By William Irving, James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Printed from the original ed., with a preface and notes by Evert A. Duyckinck.

OUR ORIGINALS. 409
I hold it downright plagiarism for any author to write, or
even to think, in the same manner with any other writer that
either did, doth, or may exist. It is a sage maxim of law" Ignorantia neminem excusat "-and the same has been extended
to literature: so that if an author shall publish an idea that
has been ever hinted by another, it shall be no exculpation for
him to plead ignorance of the fact. All, therefore, that I had
to do was to take a good pair of spectacles, or a magnifying
glass, and with Salmagundi in hand and a tableful of books
before me, to muse over them alternately, in a corner of Cockloft library: carefully comparing and contrasting all odd ends
and fragments of sentences. Little did honest Launce suspect,
when he sat lounging and scribbling in his elbow-chair with no
other stock to draw upon than his own brain, and no other
authority to consult than the sage Linkum Fidelius-little did
he think that his careless, unstudied effasions would receive such
scrupulous investigation.
By laborious researches, and patiently collating words, where
sentences and ideas did not correspond, I have detected sundry
sly disguises and metamorphoses of which, I'll be bound, Langstaff himself is ignorant. Thus, for instance-the little man in
black, is evidently no less a personage than old Goody Blake
or Goody something, filched from the Spectator, who confessedly
filched her from Otway's " wrinkled hag with age grown double." My friend Launce has taken the honest old woman,
dressed her up in the cast-off suit worn by Twaits, in Lampedo,
and endeavored to palm the imposture upon the enlightened
inhabitants of GothaLn. No further proof of the fact need be
given, than that Goody Blake was taken for a witch, and the
little man in black for a conjurer; and that they both lived in
villages, the inhabitants of which were distinguished by a most
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