"confess that my wish was to have passed undetected; but, since "it has been my fortune to fail in my original design, to have the "suppositious passages which I have inserted in my quotations "made known to the world, and the shade which began to gather

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on the splendour of Milton totally dispersed, I cannot but count "it an alleviation of my pain that I have been defeated by a man "who knows how to use advantages with so much moderation, and can enjoy the honour of conquest without the insolence of triumph. "It was one of the maxims of the Spartans not to press upon a flying enemy, and therefore their enemies were always ready to quit the field, because they knew the danger was only in opposing. "The civility with which you have thought proper to treat me "when you had incontestable superiority has inclined me to make "your victory complete without any further struggle, and not only "publickly to acknowledge the truth of the charge which you have "hitherto advanced, but to confess, without the least dissimulation, "subterfuge, or concealment, every other interpolation I have made "in those authors which you have not yet had opportunity to "examine." Accordingly, besides acknowledgment of every one of the forgeries which Mr. Douglas had detected, there was a voluntary indication of a number of others. Eight of the quarto pages were occupied with reprints of about twenty-four of the vitiated passages from Masenius, Grotius, Ramsay, Staphorstius, Foxe, Quintianus, Beza, Fletcher, Taubmann, and Heywood, the vitiating interpolations being made obvious to the eye by being printed in italics. Appended to this enumeration, and to renewed expressions of contrition, there was an explanation of the original cause of the author's hostility to Milton. One of the chief hopes of his life had been blasted by that fixed conviction in the British mind of Milton's incomparable excellence! For, about ten years before, when he had published at Edinburgh his Poetarum Scotorum Musæ Sacræ, including a new edition of the celebrated Arthur Johnston's Latin Translation of the Psalms, and when, in consequence of the recommendation by the General Assembly of the Scottish Church that this translation should be used in schools, he was in the sure expectation of a yearly demand for school editions of this portion of his book, what had happened? At that very time (1742) there had appeared the Fourth Book of Pope's Dunciad, containing this sarcastic reference to the well-known Mr. Auditor Benson of London for his extraordinary double enthu

siasm for two such diverse poets as the English Milton and the Scottish Arthur Johnston :

"On two unequal crutches propt he came,

Milton's on this, on that one Johnston's name."

Not only was this an insult to Scotland; but it had nipped in the bud all Lauder's hopes of a demand for Johnston's Psalms in school editions. "From this time," he says, "all my praises of Johnston "became ridiculous, and I was censured with great freedom for forcing upon the schools an author whom Mr. Pope had mentioned "only as a foil to a better poet." Hence his notion of a revenge on Milton by stigmatising him as a plagiary.

As the style of the quoted passages will show, this letter of confession and recantation was not absolutely Lauder's own, but was Samuel Johnson's. Implicated as Johnson was by having contributed the Preface and the Postscript to Lauder's now exploded Essay, it was necessary that he should clear himself; and, though, as Boswell tells us, "he expressed the strongest indignation against Lauder," the policy which recommended itself at once to his honesty and to his pity for the poor detected wretch was that of making the best of a bad business. Accordingly, as Boswell also informs us, he had "dictated" the letter to Lauder, compelling him to the only course that was honestly possible in the circumstances. That he may have had some difficulty, and that Lauder put his name somewhat reluctantly to the confession dictated to him, is suggested by the fact that, appended to the confession, as it appeared in print, there were nine pages of old or recent testimonials to Lauder's learning and ability, calculated to convey the impression that he might yet recover himself and be useful, and also a very ingenious closing Postscript. In this Postscript Lauder gives a different account of the cause and purpose of his deception from that which Johnson, no doubt on Lauder's own information, had put into the letter. "And, now my character is plac'd above all "suspicion of fraud by authentick documents," says this Postscript, "I'll make bold at last to pull off the mask, and declare sincerely "the true motive that induc'd me to interpolate a few lines into 66 some of the authors quoted by me in my Essay on Milton; which "was this: Knowing the prepossession in favour of Milton, how 'deeply it was rooted in many, I was willing to make a trial if the 'partial admirers of that author would admit a translation of his

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own words to pass for his sense or exhibite his meaning; which I 'thought they would not. Nor was I mistaken in my conjecture; "forasmuch as several gentlemen, seemingly persons of judgment " and learning, assur'd me they humbly conceiv'd I had not prov'd "my point, and that Milton might have written as he has done, supposing he had never seen these authors, or they had never "existed. Such is the force of prejudice!" In other words, Lauder's Essay had been a mere trap for Milton's extreme admirers, an experiment how far they would go in their defence of his originality! Would any man in his senses, if he had intended a mere general imposture, have gone to Hog's Paraphrase of Milton,-"a book common at every sale, I had almost said at every stall,"—for the Latin interpolations that were to be offered as proofs of Milton's habit of borrowing? No; but such interpolations from Hogæus had served excellently for the minor and more innocent purpose! Actually, Milton's obstinate admirers, when they were presented with his own ideas turned into Latin by one of his translators, had refused to recognise in them anything necessarily or essentially Miltonic! Was it not a public service, if even by a little stratagem, to have brought out that fact?

Lauder, when Johnson's clutch was removed from his shoulders, continued in the mood of relapse indicated by this Postscript. What he did through the year or two after 1750 one hardly knows; but in 1752-4 he contrived to pass through the press his projected edition of some of the Latin books from which he had accused Milton of borrowing. "Delectus Autorum Sacrorum Miltono Facem Prælucentium: Adcurante Gulielmo Laudero, A.M." is the general title of two very handsome octavo volumes, in which one finds collected Lauder's exertions at intervals through those years, with separate title-pages purporting that there were various printers and various publishers. Vol. I. contains a reprint of Ramsay's Poemata Sacra, certified as exact, and also a reprint of the Adamus Exul of Grotius, similarly certified; and Vol. II. contains the Sarcotis of Masenius, the Paradisus of Caspar Barlæus, as Latinised by that scholar from the Dutch of Jacob Cats, and also the incomplete Bellum Angelicum of Frederic Taubmann, together with a poem of which no mention had been made in Lauder's Essay, but which he now thought worth reproducing, viz. the First Book of the Damonomachia of Oderic Valmarana, in Latin hexameters, originally

published at Vienna in 1627. In this reproduction of the texts of so many rare Latin books there was nothing objectionable; it was in the editorial prefaces, and the editorial matter of various kinds stuffed into the interstices between the several reprints, that the animus appeared, and the significance of the general title was fully defined. As all this editorial matter is in Latin, it seems to have remained unknown how desperate Lauder had become in his hatred of Milton, and to what an extent he had relapsed from the confession into which Johnson had compelled or persuaded him. He even disowns that confession. "I should like those good men to know," he says, "that that Letter to Douglas, though it went forth in my name and with my name prefixed, was neither written by me nor "subscribed by me, nor expressed my own real sentiments, but all "the opposite, if you except only the few poems that were inter"polated, notwithstanding that, in my imprudence, and hardly "having read it through, I permitted it to be published as mine, led "into a piece of bad deceit (such is sometimes the force of a bad

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counsellor), and under the influence of some human weakness at "the time, as there is no man who is wise always." The acrimony with which, again and again, he assaults the memory of Milton is nothing less than frenzy. Thus, not content with again maintaining Milton's obligations to the poets re-edited in the volumes, or to those others mentioned in his Essay, he inserts at one place in ten consecutive pages an alphabetical syllabus or list of ninety-eight books or authors, with this heading: "Syllabus of the authors who were either furtively used by Milton, the Prince of Plagiaries, or at the least

gave him light from their previous torches in his composition of "that prodigiously famous poem of his, Paradise Lost, by which he "undeservedly won for himself his vast celebrity." Into this long list are pressed books and authors from all times and quarters, including Gower's Confessio Amantis, the novel called The Spanish Rogue, Langland's Piers Ploughman, Lucretius, Virgil, Martial, Ovid, Phædrus, Pliny, Homer and the other Greek poets, Sannazarius, Tasso, Sedulius, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, and King James I.

In the same year, 1754, which witnessed the appearance of the last instalment of Lauder's Delectus Autorum Miltono Facem Prælucentium, there was another frantic effort of Lauder's to vilify the dead man whom his soul loathed. This was a book entitled, King Charles vindicated from the Charge of Plagiarism brought against him

by Milton, and Milton himself convicted of Forgery and a Gross Imposition on the Publick." The attack was on that famous portion of Milton's Eikonoklastes which demonstrated the spuriousness of one of the prayers attributed to Charles I. in the Eikon Basilike. This was Lauder's last. All that seems to be known of him further is that he went to Barbadoes on some teaching engagement or project, and died there miserably in 1771.

One might have thought that the spectacle of the figure of this poor self-gibbeted monomaniac, thus left dangling in the air of the Literary History of England in the middle of the eighteenth century, would have deterred subsequent critics from any continuance or resumption of his speculation. It has hardly turned out so, however. The virus of Lauder's speculation has transmitted itself, and has affected critics the least conscious of having anything in common with Lauder, and the readiest to join the rest of the world in the orthodox execration of Lauder and his imposture. There is something so intrinsically fascinating, indeed, for a certain order of minds, in the question of Milton's indebtedness, that it has been pursued, or partially renewed, since Lauder's time by writer after writer in whom it would be very unfair to discern the influence of any other motives than those of the most legitimate scholarly curiosity, in combination with the most sincere admiration of Milton. A really interesting and useful book, for example, was Mr. Charles Dunster's Considerations on Milton's Early Reading and the Prima Stamina of his Paradise Lost, published in 1800, and discussing more largely than Lauder had done, but in a very different spirit, the probable effects on Milton, as on so many of his contemporaries, of early acquaintance with Sylvester's Du Bartas. Again, when Mr. Sharon Turner, in his History of the Anglo-Saxons, edition of 1807, called attention to certain striking resemblances between some passages of Paradise Lost and some portions of the Paraphrase of Genesis left among the remains of the old Anglo-Saxon poet Cadmon, he was clearly within the bounds of his duty, and made an important historical suggestion. The same can hardly be said for any of those other bibliographical rangings and conjectures, subsequent to Lauder's, of which Todd, in editing Milton, thought himself bound to take account. Todd, of course, acted in the purest spirit of loyalty to Milton; but his laborious conspectus of those modern books or writers that he had found cited by one person or another, at one