praises, which proved so detrimental to the fame of that poet. To support the fame of the author he had delighted to honour, Lauder afterwards engaged in the literary controversy, about the comparative merits of Buchanan and Johnston, known by the name " Bellum Grammaticale."[1]
In 1740, the general assembly recommended the Psalms of Johnston, as an useful exercise in the lower classes of the grammar schools; but Lauder never realized from his publication the permanent annual income which he appears to have expected, "because," says Chalmers, "he had allowed expectation to outrun probability." In 1742, Lauder was recommended by Mr Patrick Cuming, professor of church history in the university of Edinburgh, and the celebrated Colin Maclaurin, as a person fitted to hold the rectorship of the grammar school of Dundee, which had been offered to his coadjutor Ruddiman in 1710; he was again, however, doomed to suffer disappointment, and in bitterness of spirit, and despair of reaching in his native place the status to which his talents entitled him, he appears to have fled to London, where he adopted the course which finally led to the ruin of his literary reputation. His first attempts on the fame of Milton were contained in letters addressed to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1747, which that publication, certainly without due caution regarding charges so suspicious, unreservedly admitted for publication. The literary world indeed received the attacks on the honesty of the great poet with singular complacency, and the periodicals contained praises of the acuteness and industry of Lauder, some of which he afterwards ostentatiously published. The first person who attempted a discovery of the true merit of the attack, was the Reverend Mr Richardson, author of Zoilomastix, who, on the 8th of January, 1749, wrote a letter to the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, in which he maintained the falsity of Lauder's quotations from some books not very well known even to the learned world ; particularly insisting 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.[2] Although the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine arrogated to himself the praise of candour for admitting the strictures of Lauder, yet this communication 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 1750, Lauder having brought his design to maturity, published his "Essay on Milton's use and imitation of the moderns, in his Paradise Lost," to which he prefixed as a motto the very appropriate line from the author he traduced, "Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." The reader is aware, that this book consists of a tissue of passages from obscure authors, from which it is maintained that Milton surreptitiously filched the materials of Paradise Lost. In the list are two of the critic's own countrymen, Andrew Ramsay and Alexander Ross, both respectable Latin versifiers and good scholars, but neither likely to have been suspected of giving much aid to Milton; in the introduction of the former of these, the critic may have gratified a little family pride, he was father-in-law to lord Fountainhall, and consequently a connexion or relation of the author. Had the author confined his book to the tracing of such passages
- ↑ For farther information on this matter, vide the Memoir of Arthur Johnston in this collection. The reader may remark that we have there praised the classical acquirements of auditor Benson if he was the author of the Life of Johnston prefixed to the edition of his Psalms. The circumstance that the life in the Musæ Sacræ is exactly the same, leads to the conclusion that it is by Lauder.
- ↑ Gent. Mag., xx. 535.
