“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]