The scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks. Dr. John Douglas (_v. supra_) distinguished himself by his exposure of two of his countrymen, Archibald Bower, 1686–1766, who, being secretly a member of the Catholic Church, wrote a _History of the Popes_; and William Lauder 1710–1771, who attempted to prove Milton a plagiarist. Cf. Churchill’s _Ghost_, Bk. ii:— By TRUTH inspir’d when _Lauder’s_ spight O’er MILTON cast the Veil of Night, DOUGLAS arose, and thro’ the maze Of intricate and winding ways, Came where the subtle Traitor lay, And dragg’d him trembling to the day. ‘Lauder on Milton’ is one of the books bound to the trunk-maker’s in Hogarth’s _Beer Street_, 1751. He imposed on Johnson, who wrote him a ‘Preface’ and was consequently trounced by Churchill (_ut supra_) as ‘_our Letter’d_ POLYPHEME.’ Our Dodds shall be pious. The reference is to the Rev. Dr. William Dodd, who three years after the publication of _Retaliation_ (i.e. June 27, 1777) was hanged at Tyburn for forging the signature of the fifth Earl of Chesterfield, to whom he had been tutor. His life previously had long been scandalous enough to justify Goldsmith’s words. Johnson made strenuous and humane exertions to save Dodd’s life, but without avail. (See Birkbeck Hill’s _Boswell_, 1887, iii. 139–48.) There is an account of Dodd’s execution at the end of vol. i of Angelo’s _Reminiscences_, 1830. our Kenricks. Dr. William Kenrick—say the earlier annotators—who ‘read lectures at the Devil Tavern, under the Title of “The School of Shakespeare.”’ The lectures began January 19, 1774, and help to fix the date of the poem. Goldsmith had little reason for liking this versatile and unprincipled Ishmaelite of letters, who, only a year before, had penned a scurrilous attack upon him in _The London Packet_. Kenrick died in 1779. Macpherson. ‘David [James] Macpherson, Esq.; who lately, from the mere _force of his style_, wrote down the first poet of all antiquity.’ (Note to second edition.) This was ‘Ossian’ Macpherson, 1738–96, who, in 1773, had followed up his Erse epics by a prose translation of Homer, which brought him little but opprobrium. ‘Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable,’ says Johnson in the knockdown letter which he addressed to him in 1775. (Birkbeck Hill’s _Boswell_, 1887, ii. 298.) Our Townshend. See note to line 34. New Lauders and Bowers. See note to l. 80. And Scotchman meet Scotchman, and cheat in the dark. Mitford compares Farquhar’s _Love and a Bottle_, 1699, Act iii— But gods meet gods and jostle in the dark. But Farquhar was quoting from Dryden and Lee’s _Oedipus_, 1679, Act iv (at end).