On Plagiarism as One of the Fine Arts

The Mine and the Mint by Albert Goldman. Southern Illinois University Press, $5.95.

The De Quincey of this book is neither critic, familiar essayist, nor the aesthetically privileged figure of the addict. He is, quite un-Romantically, the plagiary who filled up fourteen volumes of hack work in order to make ends meet. This book has nothing to do with the author of the Confessions or Suspiria; Goldman’s subjects are those pieces now read only in libraries: “The Casuistry of Roman Meals,” “Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origin of the Rosicrucians and the Free-masons,” “Homer and the Homeridae,” “Richard Bentley,” “A Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature in Its Foremost Pretensions.” Goldman’s is a first-class demonstration that these “are almost all derived in the most direct way from printed sources, and in almost every case from a single volume.”