and therefore any attempt at wholesale
plagiarism must have been immediately detected. The _Bachelier de
Salamanque_, it is true, was in manuscript; but it had been long in the
possession of the Marquis de Lerma and his son, before it became the
property of Le Sage; and although tolerably certain that it had never
been diligently perused, Le Sage could not be sure that it had not
attracted superficial notice, and that the name was not known to many
people. Now, by eviscerating the _Bachelier de Salamanque_ of its most
entertaining anecdotes, and giving them a different title, and then
publishing the mutilated copy of a work, the name of which, with the
outline of its story, was known to many people as an acknowledged
translation, he took the most obvious means of disarming all suspicion
of plagiarism, and setting, as it seems he did, on a wrong track the
curiosity of enquirers. How came the original manuscript not to be
printed by its author? Because it could not be printed with impunity
within the jurisdiction of the Spanish monarchy: the allusions to the
abuses of the court and the favourites of the day are so obvious--the
satire upon the imbecility of the Spanish government so keen and
biting--the personal descriptions of Philip III. and Philip IV. so
exact--the corruption of its ministers of justice, and the abuses
practised in its prisons, branded in terms so lively and vehement--the
attacks upon the influence of the clergy, their hypocrisy, their
ambition, and their avarice, so frequent and severe--that while Philip
IV. and Don John of Austria, the fruit of his intrigue with the actress
Marie Calderon, so carefully pointed out, were still alive, and before
the generation to which it alludes had passed away, its publication, in
Spain at least, was impossible. The _Bachelier de Salamanque_ was not
published for the same reason; and for the same reason, even in a
country with perhaps more pretensions to freedom than Spain possessed,
no one has yet acknowledged himself the writer of _Junius_. But why do
you not produce the Spanish manuscript, and set the question at rest?
exclaims with much _naivete_ M. Neufchateau. Does such an argument
deserve serious refutation? That is, why do not you Spaniards produce a
manuscript given to one Frenchman by another at Paris, in the 18th
century, which of course, if our theory be true, he had the strongest
temptation to destroy? Rather may the Spaniards ask, why do not _you_
produc