Shewing What Is to Be Deemed Plagiarism in a Modern Author, and What Is to Be Considered as Lawful Prize
The narrator confesses: there are lots of passages in this book that he's translated from classical authors, and not all of these passages include direct quotations or citations.
The narrator admits that it may seem like cheating for an author to fill his books with lines from Greek and Roman writers.
But the narrator promises us: he has often been tempted to include much longer passages from great classical authors.
It's only been an act of restraint and self-discipline on his part that he has left out all of this information about the classics that he's just dying to share with us.
Still, people accuse him of stealing work from classical writers.
Here is the narrator's defense: classical knowledge is totally up for grabs.
We all have the right to "fatten [our] muse" (12.1.5) on this classical material; it is like delicious food for our brains.
Nowadays, we're all much stupider than they were back then.
We have to steal from classical authors to improve our own writing.
The narrator may snatch passages from ancient writers, sometimes without even naming them.
But as soon as he writes down their ideas, their feelings become his own.
Borrowing from the classics is one thing; it's very different to take lines from other modern writers without giving their names.
The narrator always insists on naming modern authors, so that he can remove their quotations from his work if they want him to.