genuine official correspondence between the Arabian governors of Sicily and their superiors in Africa, from the first landing of the Arabians in that island. Vella was now loaded with honors and pensions! It is true he showed Arabic MSS., which, however, did not contain a syllable of what he said. He pretended he was in continual correspondence with friends at Morocco and elsewhere. The king of Naples furnished him with money to assist his researches. Four volumes in quarto were at length published. Vella had the adroitness to change the Arabic MSS. he possessed, which entirely related to Mohammed, to matters relative to Sicily. He bestowed several weeks' labor to disfigure the whole, altering page for page, line for line, and word for word; but interspersed numberless dots, strokes, and flourishes, so that when he published a fac-simile, every one admired the learning of Vella, who could translate what no one else could read. He complained he had lost an eye in this minute labor; and every one thought his pension ought to have been increased. Every thing prospered about him except his eye; which some thought was not so bad neither. It was at length discovered by his blunders that the whole was a forgery, though it had now been patronized, translated, and extracted, throughout Europe. When this MS. was examined by an Orientalist, it was discovered to be nothing but a history of Mohammed and his family. Vella was condemned to imprisonment." Captain Francis Wilford, an Englishman of great learning, was imposed upon in a most remarkable manner, while resident in India, by a Hindoo pundit in whom he trusted too implicitly. His deceptions consisted of the alteration of individual proper names in Indian MSS. which he produced, the substitution of new leaves for the original ones, (no very difficult matter, since Indian books are not bound like ours, but are only loosely connected leaves,) and, in one instance, the forgery of two voluminous sections, containing 12,000 Slocas or stanzas, which he pretended to have faithfully extracted from the Puranas, and which were composed in exact imitation of their usual style. Many of these forgeries were communicated to Sir W. Jones, who, with all his learning and philosophical caution, saw no reason to doubt their genuineness. Captain Wilford published in the series of volumes entitled, "Asiatic Researches," several extensive essays which were more or less imbued with error (one on Egypt especially,) from the reliance which he placed on this masterly imitator. The corrupted MSS. were preserved by Captain Wilford, and some years after the deception was effected, he accidentally observed something peculiar in the appearance of the writing, which led him on, step by step, to a complete discovery of the imposition to which he had been subjected. His mortification, and his anxiety lest he should be regarded by the world as a participator in the fraud, threw him into a lingering disorder. As soon as possible he dispatched letters to his friends in various parts of Europe, making them acquainted with the facts, which he also published to the world soon after in a paper contained in the 8th Vol. of the Asiatic Researches. When our notable pundit was accused of the fraud, he immediately flew into apparent paroxysms of rage, imprecating the vengeance of heaven upon his head if he were not entirely innocent. Afraid that this conduct might not be adequate to reinstate him in the good opinion of Captain Wilford, he produced ten Brahmins as his compurgators, who swore by every thing sacred in their religion that no imposition had been committed. All was of no avail. Reprimanding the Brahmins for their perjury, Captain Wilford rid himself at once of them and the pundit whose fraud they had attempted to sustain. All our readers without doubt know something respecting Lauder's temporary imposition upon the public relating to the originality of Milton's Paradise Lost. We propose to give a somewhat particular account of it, as minute details concerning it are not very generally accessible. It was in 1747, that William Lauder first made his appearance before the world in the character of a detector of Milton's plagiarisms. In the beginning of that year he published in the Gentleman's Magazine with the initials of his name, W. L., a paper entitled: "Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns." Notwithstanding his pretended regret at his discovery, deep malice was apparent in the manner in which he urged and discussed the alleged obligation of Milton to other writers. This spirit induced a severity of inference on the part of Lauder far from being warranted by the circumstances asserted, even had they been true; and three several replies appeared in the columns of the same magazine, all admitting the truth of the facts presented, but resisting, we should rather say deprecating, the asperity of Lauder's deductions from them. Emboldened by this impunity, (for impunity it was comparatively, considering the actual extent of his criminality,) he, in the beginning of the year 1750, in accordance with a promise contained in the paper just mentioned, published a larger essay under the same title as the smaller, but in a volume by itself. This work was adorned with a preface and a postscript from the vigorous pen of the celebrated Dr. Johnson. Dr. Symmons, in his Life of Milton, states it as probable from Johnson's known connexion with Cave, the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, that he was intimately concerned in Lauder's former essay; but this is by no means satisfactorily evinced. In the article and the volume of which we have spoken, Milton was accused of having derived many of his images and thoughts, and even many of his forms of expression, from Grotius, and several other modern writers, of little note in our day, whatever was their reputation in their own. The chief writers designated by Lauder, besides Grotius, were Masenius, a Jesuit, Taubmann, a German professor, and Staphorstius, a Dutch divine. To support his charge, he adduced passages, as from these writers, which did indeed bear a wonderful, a more than accidental, resemblance to passages pointed out in Milton's Paradise Lost, and were sometimes completely identical with them, except that in the one case the passages were in Latin and in the other in English. On the strength of this correspondence, Lauder allowed himself the most unlimited abuse of Milton, terming him "an unlicensed plagiary," accusing him of an industrious concealment of his helps," of conduct "highly ungenerous," "absolutely unworthy of any man of probity and honor," "criminal to the last degree." "Mankind," says he, "by giving too implicit a faith to the bold assertion of our poet, that he sung things unattempted yet, have been deluded into a false opinion of Milton's being more an original author than any poet ever was before him. This opinion, and this only, has been the cause of that infinite tribute of veneration that has been paid him these sixty years past. Hence so many editions, translations, commentaries, lives, encomiums, marble busts, pictures, gold and silver medals." He attributed the well-known circumstance, that Milton would not teach his daughters to understand the languages which they were in the habit of reading to him, to his fear that they would recognize his plagiarisms. In conclusion of his treatise he made a solemn assertion of the purity of his motives and an apology for the severity of his remarks. The volume was inscribed to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The facts which Lauder alleged were not disputed in print for a great while after their publication. Nor is this strange; for who could imagine that his book was an unmingled tissue of imposture. The very impudence of his enterprise protected him. His triumph was undisturbed for nearly a year. At the end of that period, however, the fine fabric he had constructed was dissipated to the winds, and he was degraded from the patronage and society of the great to his proper estimation; he became a thing at which general indignation and contempt were directed. In 1751, Dr. Douglas published a letter to the Earl of Bath, entitled "Milton vindicated from the Charge of Plagiarism," which, in a temperate but mercilessly thorough manner exposed the vile arts of Lauder, and rescued Milton's towering fame from his malicious assault. The lines of Milton himself in the very poem so rancorously vilified, which describe the effect produced by the touch of Ithuriel's spear upon the visible form of Satan, as he sat "squat, like a toad, close at the ear of Eve," will not perhaps be regarded as entirely inapposite. Lauder was, we know, "Blown up with high conceits, engendering pride. Dr. Douglas was then rector of Eton Constantine in Shropshire, England. This letter was his first literary production. He died in 1807, bishop of Salisbury. When Lauder's book first came into his hands, and for a considerable time after its perusal, he, like others, did not once imagine it possible that the works referred to by Lauder wanted the passages ostensibly quoted from them; although he considered the deductions from the premises as unwarrantably harsh, and was ready to maintain, as he does in the first part of the letter which disclosed Lauder's fraud, that, even admitting all the premises, no inference could be drawn to Milton's discredit. In this idea he was undoubtedly misled by his veneration for the great poet; for nothing could be said in censure of any plagiarisms whatsoever, if we allow the character of innocence to those which Milton must have committed, had Lauder been veracious in his quotations. In the summer of 1750, Dr. D. went to reside for a while at the University of Oxford. Curiosity, along with the unusual facility of gratifying it which his situation afforded, induced him to make search for the books to which Lauder referred. Many of them were so rare as not to be procurable even at Oxford. The two to which Lauder had made most frequent reference, that of Masenius and the Adamus Exsul of Grotius were not to be found. Those which he did obtain, however, revealed the imposition, probably unparalleled in point of hardihood, which Milton's detractor had practised upon the world. The first circumstance, which forcibly attracted Dr. D.'s attention, was that in every case Lauder omitted telling his readers in what part of the work to which reference was made the pretended quotation was to be found. This laid him under the necessity of turning over an entire volume page by page in order to find the lines alleged to be a citation. Dr. Douglas's examination resulted in the disclosure that, of the lines adduced, those which bore any special resemblance to Milton's were invariably wanting in the original, and were therefore interpolated by Lauder. Dr. D. did not even leave Lauder the merit of having himself composed all the Latin verses that he had foisted into the productions which he pretended to quote with fairness. "The lines are good ones," says he, "and therefore let us give the honor of them to their real author." He discovered that nearly all of them were derived from a Latin translation of the Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, executed by William Hogg, or Hogæus, as he calls himself on the title-page, and printed at London in 1690. Thus Milton was branded and reviled as a plagiary for having stolen from himself! "It seems so extremely improbable," says Dr. Douglas, "that any one should ever venture to put so gross an imposition on the world, that I almost despair of being believed, although I know the certainty of the fact." Dr. Douglas also points out in Lauder's assertions many inconsistencies and extreme absurdities, such as always accompany very complicated deception. For example, he charged Milton with stealing the comparison of Eve to Pandora, in |