who said that he would burn his coat if it knew his plans has
figured in all the wars with which I have been contemporary, was a
conspicuous character in the Mexican war, and passed from camp to camp
in the war between the States. The _mot_, familiar to the classical
scholar, was doubtless attributed in his day to that dashing sheik
Chedorlaomer, and will be ascribed to both leaders in the final battle
of Armageddon. The hank of yarns told about Socrates is pieced out with
tabs and tags borrowed from different periods. I have heard, say, in the
afternoon, a good story at the expense of a famous American revival
preacher which I had read that morning in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles,
and there is a large stock of anecdotes made to screw on and screw off
for the special behoof of college presidents and university professors.
Why hold up Choricius to ridicule? He was no worse than others of his
guild. It was not Choricius, it was another Byzantine historian who
conveyed from Herodotus an unsavory retort, over which the unsuspecting
Gibbon chuckles in the dark cellar of his notes, where he keeps so much
of his high game. The Greek historian of the Roman Empire, the Roman
historian of every date, are no better, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
who has devoted many pages to the arraignment of Thucydides' style,
cribs with the utmost composure from the author he has vilipended.
Still, we must not set down every coincidence as borrowing. Thucydides
himself insists on the recurrence of the same or similar events in a
history of which human nature is a constant factor. "Undo this button"
is not necessarily a quotation from King Lear. "There is no way but
this" was original with Macaulay, and not stolen from Shakespeare.
"Never mind, general, all this has been my fault," are words attributed
to General Lee after the battle of Gettysburg. This is very much the
language of Gylippus after the failure of his attack on the Athenian
lines before Syracuse. How many heroic as well as unheroic natures have
had to say "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."

[Note: Thuc. 7, 5, 2: [Greek: ouk ephe to hamartema ekeinon all' heautou
genesthai.]]

Situations may recur, sayings may recur, but no characters come back.
Nature always breaks her mould. "I could not help muttering to myself,"
says Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, "when the good pastor this
morning told me that Klopstock was the German Milton, 'a very _German_
Milton, indeed!!!'" and Col