originality and literary reputation of Milton, whofe imitation of the moderns, he endeavoured to eftablish, by producing a variety of extracts from Paradife Loft, with analogous paffages from preceding writers. His book excited a confiderable degree of public attention, and the writer of it was for a fhort time, encouraged by Dr. Johnfon, because he thought him too frantic to be fraudulent; a fentence more remarkable for alliteration than argument, as it is a common art of felfifh defign, to affect the cant, and use the language, of warm zeal, and strong conviction.

Lauder was a man of refpectable literary attainments, with a good fhare of the characteristic acuteness of his countrymen, but foured in his temper by early misfortune, and repeated disappointments. In confequence of a blow from the golfer players, on Bruntsfield Links, he had been under the neceffity of fubmitting to an amputation of his leg; in two attempts to fucceed to VOL. II.

B

a profeffor's chair, and afterwards to the office of library keeper to the univerfity of Edinburgh, he failed. Laftly he was tempted to publish a fplendid and expensive edition of the Poetarum Scotorum Mufæ Sacræ, in two volumes, a work, which promifing both fame and profit, dropped ftill-born from the prefs, and ferved only to exhaust the little money he had faved.

Thus driven by neceffity to London, eager to attract notice, anxious to procure emolument, and not very fcrupulous in the means he employed; it ftruck him, that Milton had laid himfelf open to the charge of plagiarism, and he thought the opportunity a good one, for building his own fame, at the expence of a poet, whofe eminence, the greater it was, would in the fame proportion, elevate the man, who could make good his charges against him. But confcious of the general partiality in his favor, he commenced with a declaration, in which a malignant infinuation was artfully wrapped, in a mixture of circuitous candor, and contradictory panegyric, while his

praise,