"in the languor of age, the pains of disease, and the contempt of poverty, the granddaughter of the Author of PARADISE LOST. Nor

66

can it be questioned that, if I, who have been marked out as the "Zoilus of Milton, think this regard due to his posterity, the design "will be warmly seconded by those whose lives have been employed "in discovering his excellencies and extending his reputation." As the last sentence shows, it is Lauder himself that is supposed to be speaking, and it must have been sorely against his will. Johnson, one sees, had compelled him to accept this Postscript to his book, as well as the Preface to it, if Johnson's hand was to be in it at all; and, actually, in the last page of Lauder's book there was an advertisement that subscriptions would be received for the relief of Milton's granddaughter at four London publishing-houses, one of them that of Messrs. Payne and Bouquet in Paternoster Row, Lauder's own publishers.

In extraordinary contrast with the Johnsonian Preface and Postscript to Lauder's volume was that whole interior substance of it which belonged to Lauder himself. It consisted of 164 pages, exhibiting Milton's supposed borrowings from a number of specified modern authors. First in the list came the German Jesuit Jacobus Masenius, respecting whom modern Bibliographical Dictionaries inform us that he was born in 1606 and died in 1681, and was therefore strictly Milton's contemporary. Lauder's description of him is "Jacobus Masenius, professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Cologne about 1650, who wrote a poem entitled Sarcotidos Libri Quinque, consisting of about 2500 lines." It is on this Sarcotis of the German Jesuit, a poem in Latin hexameters, published at Cologne in 1652 (the first three books of it reported, however, as having been first published there in 1644), that Lauder lays stress. He gives an abstract or analysis of the first three books, showing that they treat of the Creation, Paradise, Satan, the Fall, etc.; and he proceeds to give extracts from these books, in the original Latin, and with English metrical versions, comparing them with passages in Milton's poem, and defying the reader to avoid the inference that Milton copied from Masenius. Next, at somewhat less length, he makes a similar challenge with respect to the Adamus Exul of Hugo Grotius, a juvenile work of that great Dutchman, in the form of a Latin tragedy, first published in 1601. Was it likely that Milton, who had himself seen and conversed with Grotius in 1638, when he was Swedish

ambassador at Paris, should have remained unacquainted with this juvenile performance of the great scholar, consisting as it did of a dramatic dialogue in Iambic trimeters, in which Satan, an Angel, Adam and Eve, and God's Voice are the speakers, with interspersed choruses in different metres? That Milton did not remain unacquainted with it was argued by the production of some of the passages which Milton was alleged to have appropriated. After the Dutchman Grotius in Lauder's list of those from whom Milton had borrowed comes Lauder's own countryman, Andrew Ramsay, one of the ministers of Edinburgh from 1614 to 1649, and Professor of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh from 1620 to 1626. By certain Poemata Sacra, first published at Edinburgh in 1633, and afterwards included in the collected Delitia Poetarum Scotorum in 1637, Ramsay had taken a place of distinction among the Scottish Latinists; and, the chief of those poems of his being in the form of four short books of Latin hexameters, treating of the Creation, Man in a State of Innocence, the Fall, and the Redemption, Lauder quotes a passage or two from it, and insists generally on Milton's obligations to Ramsay. He was also under obligations, Lauder goes on to argue, to another Scot,—that Alexander Ross (1590-1654) who is embalmed immortally for his voluminousness in one of the rhymes of Hudibras. Among the innumerable writings of this Ross had there not been a Virgilius Evangelizans, published in London in 1638, and consisting, as Lauder describes it, of "a compendious history of the Old and New Testament in Virgil's language and versification"? Extracts are given to prove Milton's debt to this book also. Then Lauder passes to a less familiar Caspar Staphorstius, a Dutch divine, who had published in 1655, at Dordrecht, a Triumphus Pacis, or congratulatory poem on the conclusion in that year of a Peace between the States of Holland and the English Commonwealth. Milton, as Secretary to Oliver at the time, could not, Lauder contends, but have heard of this poem of Staphorstius; and passages are quoted to show that he borrowed sentiments and descriptions from it. By this time Lauder has filled 111 pages; and he skims more lightly, therefore, over the following books, all enumerated, and quoted from, as having been laid under contribution by Milton for something or other the Paradisus of the Dutch Caspar Barlæus, published in 1643, and consisting of a Latin version of one of the pieces of the old Dutch vernacular poet, Jacob Cats; the Christus Triumphans,

Comedia Apocalyptica, of the Martyrologist, John Foxe, published in 1596; a Tragedy, entitled Theocrisis, by Johannes Franciscus Quintianus, published among his works in 1514; the Abrahamus Sacrificans of Theodore Beza, originally written in French, but published in Latin in 1599; the Sedechias of Carolus Malapertius, a Scriptural Tragedy, published in 1634; the Herodes Infanticida of Daniel Heinsius, published in 1636; Phineas Fletcher's Latin Satire against the Jesuits, entitled Locusta, published about 1640 (Lauder's dating, but 1627 is the proper date); and the Baptistes of George Buchanan, of which an English translation, attributed by some to Milton himself, appeared in London in 1641. No fewer than thirteen creditors of Milton in all have thus been mentioned; but Lauder, before he ends, brings up the number to eighteen by the addition of five more. Three of these are referred to rather briefly: Baptista Mantuanus, the Italian Latinist (1448-1516), for his popular Ecloga; the English Thomas Heywood, for his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, published in 1635; and Peter Du Moulin, the Elder, for his In Symbolum Apostolorum Hymni, published in 1640. Larger space is assigned to the remaining two. A certain Frederic Taubmann (1565—1613), called by Lauder "the celebrated Fredericus Taubmannus, professor of Poetry and Eloquence in the University of Wittemberg," had in his youth begun a poem, entitled Bellum Angelicum, in which the War of the Angels was to be treated in three Books of Latin hexameters, but had left only 900 lines actually accomplished. How liberally Milton had availed himself of that fragment, especially in the Sixth Book of his Epic, Lauder professed to show by several pages of extracts. Finally, and at about equal length, he illustrates Milton's special indebtedness to that excessively popular English book of his childhood and youth, Sylvester's Du Bartas, i.e. Joshua Sylvester's Translation of the "Divine Weekes and Workes" of the French Protestant poet Du Bartas.

All through Lauder's exposition one remarks the bitterness of his antipathy to Milton personally. This was shown, indeed, in the motto chosen ironically for the title-page of the volume. That motto was Milton's own line, "Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," used in the first paragraph of his Epic as describing its intended matter. Reverting to that line, at a convenient point, Lauder asks, "Have not mankind, by giving too implicit a faith to this bold "assertion, been deluded into a false opinion of Milton's being more

66

an original author than any poet ever was before him? And what "but this opinion, and this only, has been the cause of that infinite "tribute of veneration that has been paid to him these sixty years past?" But, the veil having now been torn away, posterity thenceforth would know Milton in his true character, as one of the greatest plagiarists in the world, and even a mean plagiarist! Lauder even insinuates that Milton's reason for not allowing his daughters to understand the languages of the books which they read to him mechanically was to keep secret from them the fact of his filchings; and he finds that Edward Phillips, who could not be so easily kept out of the secret, took pains, in his Theatrum Poetarum, published in 1675, to conceal the extent of his deceased uncle's acquaintance with some of the authors there mentioned.

66

Lauder's Essay seems to have been successful for some, at least, of his immediate purposes. One of these was indicated by an Advertisement on one of its pages in these terms: "Gentlemen who are desirous to secure their children from ill examples by a domestic 66 education, or are themselves inclined to gain or to retrieve the knowledge of the Latin tongue, may be waited on at their own "houses by the author of the following essay, upon the receipt of a letter directed to the publisher, or the author at the corner house, "the bottom of Ayre-street, Piccadilly. N.B. Mr. Lauder's abilities "and industry in his profession can be well attested by persons of "the first rank in literature in this metropolis." Whether the essay brought him many pupils one does not know; but a subscription was soon on foot for a collective edition by him of some of the rarer Latin books to which he had called attention.

Several persons, however, had been on Lauder's track, and one of them spoke out in an absolutely crushing manner. This was the Rev. John Douglas, then a Shropshire clergyman, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. In a tract published in 1751, in the form of a letter to his patron the Earl of Bath, and with the title Milton no Plagiary; or, A Detection of the Forgeries contained in Lauder's Essay on the Imitations in the Paradise Lost, Mr. Douglas proved that Lauder, in his professed quotations from the authors from whom Milton was said to have plagiarised, had tampered outrageously with the texts. It was shown that in one quotation from Staphorstius the only lines that really corresponded with anything in Paradise Lost were eight lines not occurring in the text of Staphorstius at all, but foisted into

VOL. II

K

that text from—who could have supposed such audacity?—William Hog's Latin Paraphrase of Paradise Lost itself, of date 1690, where they occurred as a translation of five lines of Milton's own English. It was shown that another very emphatic line quoted from Staphorstius as actually identical with a line in Milton was not in Staphorstius, but was the same Hogeus's Latin rendering of that very line in Milton. Similarly it was shown that an important passage from Hogaus had been interpolated by Lauder into a professed quotation from Masenius, and that, in fact, one of Lauder's processes had been to take bits of Milton himself as they stood in the Latin of his translator Hog, and insert them into the passages from Latin authors produced as samples of Milton's dexterity in stealing. In the case of one quotation from Taubmann, where the interpolated matter could not be traced to Hogæus, it was shown that it must have been invented by Lauder himself, translating for the nonce into Latin the very passage of Milton which he wanted to prove that Milton had borrowed. Other tamperings with the texts of Lauder's professed quotations were pointed out; and, though Mr. Douglas's tract was brief in comparison with Lauder's Essay, and did not go over all Lauder's ground, the general effect was that of two or three wellaimed and powerful shots upon a crazy fabric.

Never was there such a collapse. Lauder's publishers, Messrs. Payne and Bouquet, hastened to disown him. They sent out an announcement, dated 1st December 1750, declaring that, having asked for his defence, and received nothing more satisfactory than an acknowledgment of the charge against him, with an expression of his wonder at the folly of the public in making "such an extraordinary rout" about such a trifle, they had broken all connexion with him, and would thenceforth sell his book only as "a curiosity of fraud and interpolation which all the ages of literature cannot parallel." Hardly had this disclaimer appeared when there came out in print, in Lauder's own name ("By William Lauder, A.M.," are the words on the title-page, where the publisher's name is given as "W. Owen, at Homer's Head, near Temple Bar "), a quarto pamphlet of 24 pages, in the form of "A Letter to the Reverend Mr. Douglas, occasioned by his Vindication of Milton," dated "Dec. 29, 1750." It is the most complete and abject confession possible of Lauder's delinquencies. "I will not so far dissemble my weakness or "my fault," says the author, addressing Mr. Douglas, "as not to