contriver of it found his way to Johnson, who is represented, by sir John Hawkins, not indeed as an accomplice in the fraud, but, through motives of malignity to Milton, delighting in the detection, and exulting that the poet’s reputation would suffer by the discovery.  More malice to a deceased friend cannot well be imagined.  Hawkins adds, “that he wished well to the argument must be inferred from the preface, which, indubitably, was written by him.”  The preface, it is well known, was written by Johnson, and for that reason is inserted in this edition.  But if Johnson approved of the argument, it was no longer than while he believed it founded in truth.  Let us advert to his own words in that very preface.  “Among the inquiries to which the ardour of criticism has naturally given occasion, none is more obscure in itself, or more worthy of rational curiosity, than a retrospection of the progress of this mighty genius in the construction of his work; a view of the fabrick gradually rising, perhaps from small beginnings, till its foundation rests in the centre, and its turrets sparkle in the skies; to trace back the structure, through all its varieties, to the simplicity of the first plan; to find what was projected, whence the scheme was taken, how it was improved, by what assistance it was executed, and from what stores the materials were collected; whether its founder dug them from the quarries of nature, or demolished other buildings to embellish his own.”  These were the motives that induced Johnson to assist Lauder with a preface; and are not these the motives of a critic and a scholar?  What reader of taste, what man of real knowledge, would not think his time well employed in an enquiry so curious, so interesting, and instructive?  If Lauder’s facts were really true, who would not be glad, without the smallest tincture of malevolence, to receive real information?  It is painful to be thus obliged to vindicate a man who, in his heart, towered above the petty arts of fraud and imposition, against an injudicious biographer, who undertook to be his editor, and the protector of his memory.  Another writer, Dr. Towers, in an Essay on the Life and Character of Dr. Johnson, seems to countenance this calumny.  He says:  “It can hardly be doubted, but that Johnson’s aversion to Milton’s politics was the cause of that alacrity, with which he joined with Lauder in his infamous attack on our great epic poet, and which induced him to assist in that transaction.”  These words would seem to describe an accomplice, were they not immediately followed by an express declaration, that Johnson was “unacquainted with the imposture.”  Dr. Towers adds, “It seems to have been, by way of making some compensation to the memory of Milton, for the share he had in the attack of Lauder, that Johnson wrote the prologue, spoken by Garrick, at Drury lane theatre, 1750, on the performance of the Masque of Comus, for the benefit of Milton’s granddaughter.”  Dr. Towers is not free from prejudice; but, as Shakespeare