Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton’s line is a neat little trapdoor under the grand staircase of “originality.” It doesn’t merely complain that people are unfair; it exposes the status games that decide what counts as theft versus taste. The same act - borrowing an idea - is judged differently depending on the source’s social prestige. Steal from your contemporaries and you’re a hack. Echo the Greeks and suddenly you’re “learned.” The joke is that the moral label isn’t attached to the behavior but to the brand.

The intent is satiric and surgical: Colton is pricking a literary culture that treats the past as a permission slip. “The ancients” function as a kind of cultural laundering service. Time scrubs fingerprints. Once an idea is old enough, appropriation can masquerade as tribute, or better, as scholarship. “Cried down” and “cried up” matters, too: he’s describing not careful judgment but a chorus, the reflexive crowd-response that polices reputation in salons, reviews, and universities.

Contextually, this lands in an early-19th-century England where classical education was both gatekeeping and glamour. Latin tags and antique allusions signaled class, schooling, and authority; being “well-read” in antiquity could cover for a lack of originality in the present. Colton’s subtext is more acid than it first appears: plagiarism isn’t simply an ethical line, it’s a social verdict. The culture doesn’t reward creativity as much as it rewards the right kind of citation - the kind that flatters inherited hierarchies.

Read now, it’s eerily current: we still excuse imitation when it comes packaged as homage, canon, or “influence,” and we still punish it when it threatens someone’s market share.