Ossian Collection > Scottish eccentrics

WILLIAM LAUDER 217
complacency, and the periodicals contained praises of the
acuteness and industry of Lauder, some of which he after-
wards ostentatiously published."
The Rev. Mr Richardson, author of Zoilomastik, was
the first to subject Lauder's charges to critical examina-
tion, and early in 1749 he wrote to the Gentleman's
Magazine declaring that some of the passages Lauder
cited from books little known even to the learned world,
accusing Milton of utilising them wholesale in his poems,
did not, in fact, exist in the works in question at all. In
particular Mr Richardson insisted that the passage "non
me judice", which Lauder had "extracted" from Grotius,
was not to be found in that author, and that passages said
to be from Masenius and Staphorstius belonged to a
partial translation of Milton's Paradise Lost by Hog, who
had written twenty years subsequently to the death of
Milton. It gives another amusing twist to this "comedy of
errors" to learn that "although the editor of the Gentle-
man's Magazine arrogated to himself the praise of candour,
for admitting the strictures of Lauder, yet this com-
munication of Mr Richardson's was not published until
the forgeries had been detected in another quarter, on the
ground of unwillingness to give currency to so grave and
unexpected a charge, without full examination". In the
editorial opinion the living dog was of far greater con-
sequence than the dead lion. Lauder's charges against
Milton could be taken on trust and printed gladly as
good "copy". But charges against the living Lauder were
another matter.
Accordingly, nothing having occurred to give him
pause — emboldened, probably, by the non-detection of
his first series of fraudulent "extracts" and no doubt
sufficiently confident that the range of writers upon
whom he was ostensibly drawing were little enough
known — Lauder continued to pursue his "studies" ener-
getically and brought his plan to completion by the
publication, in 1750, of his Essay on Milton's Use and
Imitation of the Moderns in his Paradise Lost. He had a