s very
different. He wrote singly and alone. In the whole progress of the work
he did not receive more than ten essays. This was a scanty contribution.
For the rest, the author has described his situation: "He that condemns
himself to compose on a stated day, will often bring to his task an
attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed,
a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he
will labour on a barren topick, till it is too late to change it; or, in
the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance,
which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine
or reduce." Of this excellent production, the number sold on each day
did not amount to five hundred: of course, the bookseller, who paid the
author four guineas a week, did not carry on a successful trade. His
generosity and perseverance deserve to be commended; and happily, when
the collection appeared in volumes, were amply rewarded. Johnson lived
to see his labours nourish in a tenth edition. His posterity, as an
ingenious French writer has said, on a similar occasion, began in his
life-time.

In the beginning of 1750, soon after the Rambler was set on foot,
Johnson was induced, by the arts of a vile impostor, to lend his
assistance, during a temporary delusion, to a fraud not to be paralleled
in the annals of literature[o]. One Lauder, a native of Scotland, who
had been a teacher in the university of Edinburgh, had conceived a
mortal antipathy to the name and character of Milton. His reason was,
because the prayer of Pamela, in sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, was, as he
supposed, maliciously inserted by the great poet in an edition of the
Eikon Basilike, in order to fix an imputation of impiety on the
memory of the murdered king. Fired with resentment, and willing to reap
the profits of a gross imposition, this man collected, from several
Latin poets, such as Masenius the jesuit, Staphorstius, a Dutch divine,
Beza, and others, all such passages as bore any kind of resemblance to
different places in the Paradise Lost; and these he published, from time
to time, in the Gentleman's Magazine, with occasional interpolations of
lines, which he himself translated from Milton. The public credulity
swallowed all with eagerness; and Milton was supposed to be guilty of
plagiarism from inferior modern writers. The fraud succeeded so well,
that Lauder collected the whole into a volume, and advert