TRANSATLANTIC NOTICE OF MR. W. PEAKS'S "COURT INTRIGUES."
There is no hope for a plagiarist in these days. The number of books, which render a perusal of all impossible, even by a reviewer who lived without sleep and read incessantly all his life, might seem at first to favour escape from detection; but such is not the case. The mechanical means which enable books to be produced in such numbers, also increase the critical staff, and scatter a " detective" literary police over the world. The mail that brings the President's message to his Senate, has also brought us a reclamation from Nova Scotia touching Mr. W. Peake's plagiarism in Court Intrigues, exposed in our columns on the 7th of March. Our active and zealous correspondent has also addressed a letter to the publisher, and en- closed a copy to us. " I need not," he writes to the bibliopole, " say how much it imports your interest to require satisfactory proof at the hands of Mr. Peaks, accounting for the strange coincidence between two originals: nor does it become me to point out the course which, in the possible absence of such proof, you might successfully adopt." How this matter stands be- tween translator and publisher, we do not know; but as the Nova Scotian remonstrant' receives the Spectator regularly," he will have perceived that we had already done our part towards stopping the currency of any delu- sion in regard to the book.
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