Milton no Plagiary; Or, A Detection of the Forgeries contained in Lauder’s Essay on the Imitation of the Moderns in Paradise Lost. In a letter humbly addressed to the Right Honorable the Earl of Bath [...] Second Edition, Corrected and enlarged, by the

Full title: Milton no Plagiary; Or, A Detection of the Forgeries contained in Lauder’s Essay on the Imitation of the Moderns in Paradise Lost. In a letter humbly addressed to the Right Honorable the Earl of Bath, By the Rev. John Douglas, A.M. The Second Edition, Corrected and enlarged, by the Addition of a Postscript. 8vo. pp. 98. Signatures: A2 B-N4. New wrappers. Includes half title. The revised, expanded second, and last contemporary edition of Douglas’s definitive exposure of William Lauder, first published as Milton Vindicated in 1751 (see Bib# 4103321/Fr# 612 in this collection). In 1747, in various articles in the Gentleman’s Magazine, published by Edmund Cave, with the the nihil obstat of Cave’s literary advisor, Samuel Johnson, the Scottish Lauder had ‘demonstrated’ that John Milton had plagiarized large sections of Paradise Lost from various neo-Latin sources. Douglas’s new ‘Postscript,’ which occupies pp. 81-98 and is dated 17 May 1756, graciously exempts Dr. Johnson (‘one Gentleman in particular’) from blame for his initial credulity and his assistance to Lauder with ‘touches of [his] masterly pen,’ on the grounds that he soon came to realize the imposture, and took measures to induce Lauder to confess and recant – if only with a treacherous re-recantation in one notorious instance [that is, Lauder’s Letter to the Reverend Mr Douglas (1751), see Bib# 4103314/Fr# 604, said to have been ‘dictated’ by Johnson (and treated as entirely Johnson’s by J. D. Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson (Oxford, 2000, 51.1LLD, I: pp. 328-340, with a good notice), when Lauder simply withdrew his confession in a ‘Postscript’ Johnson must not have seen before publication].