200] A TOPOGRAPHICAL 



productions must know. A more sincere Churchman, and friend 

 to Protestantism, perhaps, never existed ; and so unimpeachable 

 was his integrity, that if he had been convinced of the necessity of 

 abjuring his Protestant faith, and adopting that dictated by the 

 Church of Rome, he would have publicly avowed his sentiments. 



In one instance Johnson was the dupe of an impostor. William 

 Lander, a Scotchman, had with unparalleled impudence represented 

 Milton as a plagiarist, and produced some passages from Grotius, 

 and other modern Latin authors, which had a faint resemblance to 

 some passages in " Paradise Lost." In 1750 Lander published 

 some scraps of Hog's Latin Translation of the immortal production 

 of our great Epic Poet, and averred that the mass thus fabricated 

 was the archetype from which Milton copied, and to this pamphlet 

 Johnson wrote a preface, in full persuasion of Lander's integrity. 

 In the postscript we have a specimen of the powerful and persua- 

 sive eloquence of our great ethical writer, who recommended a 

 subscription for Milton's grand-daughter : "It is yet in the power 

 of a great people," says he, "to reward the poet whose name they 

 boast, and from alliance to whose genius Jhey claim some kind of 

 superiority to every other nation of the earth ; that poet whose 

 works may possibly be read when every other monument of British 

 greatness shall be obliterated; to reward him not with pictures or 

 with medals, which if he sees, he sees with contempt, but with 

 tokens of gratitude, which he, perhaps, may even now consider not 

 unworthy the regard of an immortal spirit/' From this passage we 

 may justly defend Johnson from having been a party to the forgery 

 of Lander, which was afterwards detected and exposed to popular 

 execration by Dr. Douglas. 



Soon after the conclusion of The Rambler, Dr. Hawkesworth and 

 Dr. Warton began a periodical work entitled " The Adventurer/' 

 to which Johnson contributed several papers, the profits of which 

 were, by his desire, given to Dr. Bathurst, a physician, whom he 

 highly respected. 



Johnson's reputation as a man of genius and literature was now 

 high, and the circle of his friends extensive. Among others, Sir 

 Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Goldsmith, and Mr. Burke, were the most 

 distinguished as well as the highest in his estimation. Reynolds ' 

 had from the first reading of Johnson's Life of Savage conceived a 

 very high admiration of the literary powers of the author, and when 

 they accidentally met at the house of a friend, an intimacy com- 

 menced which termijiated only with life. Johnson at this period also 



