In the beginning of 1750, soon after the Rambler was set on foot,
Johnson was induced, by the arts of a vile impostor, to lend his
assistance, during a temporary delusion, to a fraud not to be paralleled
in the annals of literature[o]. One Lauder, a native of Scotland, who
had been a teacher in the university of Edinburgh, had conceived a
mortal antipathy to the name and character of Milton. His reason was,
because the prayer of Pamela, in sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, was, as he
supposed, maliciously inserted by the great poet in an edition of the
Eikôn Basilike, in order to fix an imputation of impiety on the
memory of the murdered king. Fired with resentment, and willing to reap
the profits of a gross imposition, this man collected, from several
Latin poets, such as Masenius the jesuit, Staphorstius, a Dutch divine,
Beza, and others, all such passages as bore any kind of resemblance to
different places in the Paradise Lost; and these he published, from time
to time, in the Gentleman's Magazine, with occasional interpolations of
lines, which he himself translated from Milton. The public credulity
swallowed all with eagerness; and Milton was supposed to be guilty of
plagiarism from inferior modern writers. The fraud succeeded so well,
that Lauder collected the whole into a volume, and advertised it under
the title of An Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns, in
his Paradise Lost; dedicated to the universities of Oxford and
Cambridge. While the book was in the press, the proof-sheets were shown
to Johnson, at the Ivy lane club, by Payne, the bookseller, who was one
of the members. No man in that society was in possession of the authors
from whom Lauder professed to make his extracts. The charge was
believed, and the contriver of it found his way to Johnson, who is
represented, by sir John Hawkins, not indeed as an accomplice in the
fraud, but, through motives of malignity to Milton, delighting in the
detection, and exulting that the poet's reputation would suffer by the
discovery. More malice to a deceased friend cannot well be imagined.