Dr. Douglas, to whom the world is indebted for investigating and detecting Lauder’s baseness, vindicated Milton from the injustice of the charge, in an answer full of diligent research of those authors who were said to have furnished Milton with materials for his poem. Dr. Douglas commences by saying, “Our Zoilus charges Milton with having borrowed both the plan of his poem, and also particular passages, from other authors. Should these charges even prove true, will it follow that his pretensions to genius are disproved? The same charge might be brought against Virgil; as there is scarcely a passage in his Æneid but is taken from the Iliad or Odyssey. There is no shadow of truth in the assertion made by Lauder, that infinite tribute of veneration had been paid to Milton, through men’s ignorance of his having been indebted to the assistance of other authors, when, on the contrary, those very persons who gave him the greatest praise were the principal discoverers of many of his imitations. “It did not enter my head,” continues Dr. Douglas, “that our critic should have the assurance to urge false quotations in support of his charge; and therefore did I, and, as I imagine, did every other person, believe, that the authors he quoted really contained those lines which he attributed to them, and which bear so striking a resemblance to passages in Paradise Lost, that the reader cannot avoid concluding, with Lauder, that Milton had really seen and imitated them. Will it not, therefore, be thought extraordinarily strange, and excite the utmost indignation in every candid person’s breast, if the reverse of all this shall appear to be the case; if it can be clearly proved that our candid conscientious critic, whose notions of morality taught him to accuse Milton of the want of common probity or honour for having boasted that he sung things yet unattempted in prose or rhyme, has, in order to make good his charge against Milton, had recourse to forgeries, perhaps the grossest that ever were obtruded on the world?”