“After the most careful search, I can safely pronounce that the above line and a half have no existence in the Paradise Lost.”
From the difficulty of rebutting Lauder’s evidence against Milton, he had acquired some merit in the eyes of men of learning, which procured him the countenance of the great, and encouraged him to open a subscription for the publication of a new edition of those authors who, according to him, had held the torch to Milton.
Upon the publication of Dr. Douglas’s remarks on Lauder, the booksellers who had undertaken his work, thought proper to prefix the following notice to each copy of it:—
“After ten months’ insolent triumph, the Rev. Dr. Douglas has favoured the world with a detection of this scene of villany, and has so powerfully urged his proofs, that no hope was left of invalidating them; an immediate application to Lauder was necessary, and a demand, that the books from whence he had taken the principal controverted passages, should be put into our hands. He then with great confidence acknowledged the interpolation, and seemed to wonder at the folly of the world, for making such an extraordinary rout about eighteen or twenty lines. As this man has been guilty of such a wicked imposition on us and the public, and is capable of so daring an avowal of it, we declare that we will have no further intercourse with him, and we now sell his book, only as a curiosity of fraud and interpolation, which all the ages of literature cannot parallel.
“John Payne,
“Joseph Bousuet.”
In a letter addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lauder says, “I own the charge of Dr. Douglas to be just, and I humbly profess my sorrow, but I cannot forbear to take notice, that my interpolating these authors proceeded rather from my being hurried away by violent passions, and rash imprudence, without duly weighing the case, and chiefly from a fatal anxiety not to fall short of my proof in that arduous undertaking; excusing myself on the score, that Pope’s criticisms had spoilt the sale of my edition of Dr. Anthony Johnston’s elegant paraphrase of the Psalms in Latin verse: and I bethought me of this only way left of enhancing his merit by lessening that of Milton, even as Pope had endeavoured to raise Milton by lessening Johnston’s; and I thought, if I could strip Milton of his chief merit, fertility and sublimity of thought, I should at once retrieve Johnston’s honour, and convict Pope of pronouncing so erroneous a judgment, in giving so vast a preference to Milton above Johnston: a task in every way arduous and unpopular, had not necessity in a manner compelled me, as the author whom I highly value, and on whose reputation my subsistence in life in a great measure depended, was lately discredited by Pope, both in North and South Britain, in his Dunciad; and in consequence of those remarks, the sale of my edition of Johnston fell considerably, and was thought nothing of.”
Lauder wrote also to Dr. Douglas in the following curious strain:—“I resolved to attack Milton’s fame, and found some passages which gave me hopes of stigmatizing him as a plagiarist; the further I carried my researches, the more eager I grew for the discovery; the more my hypothesis was opposed, the more was I heated with rage.”[13]
Lauder had been sanguine in his hopes that the unreserved confession would atone for his guilt, and that his subscription for a new edition of “Sarcotis,” and “Adamus Exul,” would meet with the same encouragement as at first; but the anxiety of the public to see them was at an end, and the design of reprinting them met with little or no success. Thus, grown desperate by disappointment, with equal inconsistency and imprudence he renewed his attack upon the author of Paradise Lost, and then gave the world, as a reason which excited him to continue his forgeries, that Milton had attacked the character of Charles the First; by saying, that that king had interpolated Pamela’s prayer from the Arcadia, in the Icon Basilike. He also scrupled not to abuse most unjustifiably Dr. Douglas, as the first exposer of his own forgery.
Lauder afterwards went to Barbadoes, and died there in great poverty in the year 1770.
Early in the eighteenth century (1704) there was published, in London, a history of the island of Formosa, off the coast of China, accompanied by an extraordinary narrative of the author, who went under the name of George Psalmanazar, and who, from the idolatries of his own country, represented himself to have become a convert to Christianity.