William Lauder (c. 1710–c. 1771), a Latin teacher and editor, was first involved in academic controversy, with a political slant, when he championed Arthur Johnston’s translation of the Psalms (1633–37), particularly number 104, as superior to the famed George Buchanan’s version (1556).1 Lauder had edited Johnston’s Latin paraphrases of the Psalms in the first volume of his two-volume Poetarum Scotorum Musae Sacrae (1739), along with selections of a few others’ paraphrases, and in the second volume he had anthologized a poetical debate about the relative merits of Johnston’s, Buchanan’s, and other Scottish poets’ Latin versions of Psalm 104. The great Buchanan, with strong ties to Elizabeth, was by many Scottish nationalists, including Lauder, considered a traitor to Mary, Queen of Scots, although Lauder said his main reason for preferring Johnston’s version of Psalm 104 as a text for the schools was its relative simplicity. In his introductory essays in Poetarum Scotorum, Lauder, nevertheless, criticized Buchanan, and in later pamphlets accused his supporters of forgery and false quotation.2 For complicated reasons, Lauder shifted the object of his attacks and applied the same tactics in an assault on John Milton, whose politics he openly deplored.3 On 5 September 1745, for example, he wrote—not for the first time—to his publisher Thomas Ruddiman, accusing Milton of having plagiarized a substantial part of Paradise Lost.4 Lauder evidently thought that Ruddiman, a royalist and Jacobite, would be receptive to these claims, especially since the last Jacobite uprising was then under way. In his detailed and fierce response, Ruddiman concluded: “notwithstanding the many foul blots of [Milton’s] character, there is none that will impartially read but two pages of his Paradise Lost, but must be satisfy’d that he was such a masterly poet, that he needed not to pilfer either thoughts or expressions from any other.”5 Ruddiman clearly found Lauder obnoxious and later noted, “I was so sensible of the weakness and folly of that man [Lauder] that I shunned his company, as far as decently I could.”6

Soon after his rejection by Ruddiman, on 31 October 1745—the day that Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, left Edinburgh for the “invasion” of 1745—Lauder quit his post at Dundee Grammar School. He went to England the following spring and soon began prosecuting his attack on Milton in a new venue.7 From January to August 1747 he published letters in the Gentleman’s Magazine, attempting to substantiate his claims of Milton’s plagiarism by citation of passages in Paradise Lost alongside parallels in the Latin poems of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and others.8 Cave may have introduced Lauder to Johnson at this time, although Johnson was by then working less on the GM and more on his Dictionary. It is also possible that Lauder contacted Johnson independently. No matter how it happened, Johnson was involved by August. In that month’s issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine (XVII.404) appeared proposals for printing Hugo Grotius’s Adamus Exul, one of the works cited in the earlier articles as a source of Paradise Lost.9 To the proposals proper, Johnson added several explanatory paragraphs.1 The proposals were published separately in early September. About two years later, Lauder used Johnson’s paragraphs, with the addition of two of his own, as the preface to his Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns in his Paradise Lost (1750), an augmented, more virulent redaction of his several pieces in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1747.2 The text below is based on the unique surviving copy of the independently published proposals,3 but differences in the Gentleman’s Magazine version and in the preface to the Essay (1750) are noted in the textual apparatus.4