Douglas had handled Johnson gently in his Milton Vindicated, referring to him as “the elegant and nervous writer” (p. 78), but there was no escaping the fact that he and the Gentleman’s Magazine had supported Lauder and may have, at first, suppressed his critics.1 Something more than the amended preface and postscript in Lauder’s Essay was required. Late in 1750, for publication about the first of the year, Lauder was made to prepare a written retraction of his claims in A Letter to the Reverend Mr. Douglas, Occasioned by his Vindication of Milton. As Fleeman asserts, following Boswell (Life, I.229), “The whole of this retraction was dictated to Lauder by SJ” (Bibliography, I.321). Lauder distanced himself from this retraction in a postscript, which he must have added between taking dictation from Johnson and going to the printer, and by the addition, between Johnson’s final paragraph and the postscript, of many “Testimonies concerning Mr. Lauder”—letters from various respected persons expressing respect for Lauder. Since some of these are advertised in the title of the Letter, their addition was presumably known to Johnson and the publishers, but it is hard to be sure. It is clear from later documents, including his Apology for Mr. Lauder, in a Letter Humbly Addressed to his Grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury (1751), that Lauder found various ways of exonerating himself. One of his tactics was to reverse the charges and childishly blame Milton for starting it first, by interpolating lines from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia in King Charles’s Eikon Basilike and then attacking them. Lauder also distanced himself from Johnson’s dictated Letter in his last publication, Charles I. Vindicated of the Charge of Plagiarism (1754), calling its “terms much more submissive and abject than the nature of the offence required” (p. 4), but praising Johnson as “an ingenious gentleman (for whose amazing abilities I had conceived the highest veneration, and in whose candor and friendship I repos’d the most implicite and unlimited confidence)” (pp. 3–4).

After several years of rearguard action, Lauder left England, as he had earlier left Scotland, in disgrace. He died in poverty in Barbados about 1771. The Lauder affair, however, continued to dog Johnson on and off for the rest of his professional life. It is possible that he made a last statement on it in a note in the Gentleman’s Magazine’s monthly book list for February 1754 (pp. 97–98), where there is a comment on Lauder’s last-ditch effort to save his reputation and attack Milton:

Nevertheless, several writers, including his friend John Hawkins and his enemy Charles Churchill, continued to believe Johnson was complicit in the affair.3 Francis Blackburne brought up the matter late in Johnson’s life in Remarks on Johnson’s Life of Milton (1780) and accused Johnson of having written one of Lauder’s rebuttals to an attacker. Johnson was nettled enough to write in a copy of Blackburne’s hostile Remarks on Johnson’s Life of Milton (1780), now in the British Library, “In the business of Lauder I was deceived: partly by thinking the man too frantick to be fraudulent.”4

The sole separate edition (1751) supplies our text. We include the title page of this work because the full title and the epigraphs throw light on Lauder’s proceedings. Hawkins printed the Letter without citations in his Life (pp. 167–69), and Reed printed it in full in Works 1788 (XIV.129–55), both with a good deal of variation in the accidentals.5