I wondered whether Donald Trump, to show solidarity with Melania, might begin his acceptance speech with the words “Four score and seven years ago . . ..”  No such luck, but I was interested to learn not long ago that the final words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address were cribbed.  He ended the Address: “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English in the late fourteenth century.  The preface to his Bible states: “This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people.”  The statement dates from 1384, twenty-three score and nineteen years before Lincoln spoke.  I don’t read the Bible very often, and I rarely venture into works written in Middle English, so it figured I was going to miss this connection.  Daniel Hannan pointed it out in his superb “Inventing Freedom”.

In his first address to Parliament after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill said “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”  Theodore Roosevelt had made a very similar statement in 1897.  Decades before Churchill, Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom Oscar Wilde had a love affair, said that poetry “is forged slowly and painfully, link by link, with blood and sweat and tears.”  Even earlier, the poets Donne and Byron each turned phrases incorporating tears, sweat, and blood, not necessarily in that order.

The moving final paragraphs of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech, where he rings the changes on “Let Freedom Ring” are remarkably similar to an address to the Republican National Convention in 1952 by a gentleman named Archibald Carey, Sr.

Another class of borrowings arises when the original author is still living and has given permission for the use of his or her words, but which the current speaker or writer claims as his or her own.  In 2008, candidate Obama replied to candidate Clinton’s accusation that his ideas were “just words” by pointing out that the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and other famous statements were also “just words”.  Mr. Obama’s friend Deval Patrick had earlier made the same point in virtually the same words, but Senator Obama had not given Governor Patrick credit for them.  Governor Patrick confirmed that his friend had used the words with permission (although some critics thought the permission might have come after the fact) and then-Senator Obama agreed that he should have given Governor Patrick credit.

The relationship between President Kennedy and Ted Sorensen is more complicated.  Kennedy received the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Profiles in Courage,” which was published under his name.  There is good reason to think that most of the book was written by Sorensen.  Sorensen is said to have written Kennedy’s inaugural address, although Kennedy acted as if he were the author.  When a reporter, Hugh Sidey, visited Kennedy on January 17, 1961, Kennedy was writing on a legal pad and indicated that he was in the act of composing his inaugural address.  It later turned out that he was copying Sorensen’s text into his own hand.  After the President was murdered, the story goes that Mrs. Kennedy insisted that Sorensen destroy the draft of the speech he had prepared.

There is no shame in a president getting help on an inaugural address.  We know that Lincoln asked for William Seward’s editorial assistance on his First Inaugural.  Neither man made any attempt to hide the fact, and scholars have been able to review Seward’s edits to give us a good idea of what the speech owes to Lincoln and what to Seward.  The Kennedy case is different only because the parties insisted on keeping Sorensen’s role hidden.  Sorensen revealed his version of the story late in his life.

A more extreme example is also more speculative.  The writer Jack Cashill is convinced that Bill Ayers wrote “Dreams from My Father,” a book whose cover declares that its author is Barack Obama.  I haven’t read Cashill’s book (“Deconstructing Obama”) but I understand the author uses sophisticated methods of textual analysis to attribute the authorship of “Dreams” to Ayers.  Perhaps historians of a later generation will sort the story out, if indeed there is anything to be sorted.

And let’s not even examine the extensive plagiarism that Joe Biden committed in 1988, when he made a few superficial changes to a speech given by Neil Kinnock, the leader at the time of Britain’s Labor Party, and presented it as his own.

So, Melania Trump or her speech writer might have figured that cribbing a few phrases from Michelle Obama was no big deal, given the extensive history of heavy borrowing by all the worthies who went before her.  But context is everything and what may be forgiven in an Obama, overlooked in a Martin Luther King, or ignored in a Kennedy, is not going to go unnoticed when a Slovenian supermodel tries it.  A better way would have been: “As was said most recently by our First Lady, a woman whose house I hope to occupy with the same grace and dignity she demonstrates, and whose vegetable garden I hope to tend with my son Barron when the next growing season comes to Washington, Donald and I were ‘raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life . . . . .’”