1. Lives of ‘Gray’ and ‘Milton’ in Lonsdale (ed.), 4: 182, 1: 294. For general discussion of Johnson’s attitude to borrowing, see Lonsdale, 1: 331–2; Howard Weinbrot, The Formal Strain: Studies in Augustan Imitation and Satire (University of Chicago Press, 1969), esp. pp. 82–5;
2. and James Engell, ‘Johnson on Novelty and Originality’, Modern Philology 75 (February 1978): 273–9.
3. While Johnson does not define these more atrocious offences, they may have included literary forgery (this is discussed elsewhere in this chapter) and the acts of identity theft perpetrated against writers such as Mark Akenside and Henry Mackenzie which he would some time later discuss with Boswell. See Boswell’s Life of Johnson (George Birkbeck Hill (ed.), rev. L.F. Powell), six vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), 1: 359–61. For Johnson’s views about various cases of literary deception, see Jack Lynch, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
4. Lauder’s disreputable campaign against Milton, the process of its exposure and the general public controversy that resulted have all been researched in detail by Michael J. Marcuse. See his ‘The Lauder Controversy and the Jacobite Cause’, Studies in Burke and his Time 18 (1977): 27–47, and ‘“The Scourge of Impostors, the Terror of Quacks”: John Douglas and the Exposé of William Lauder’, Huntington Library Quarterly 42 (1978–9): 231–61. An abbreviated overview of the whole matter is provided by the same author’s ‘Miltonoklastes: The Lauder Affair Reconsidered’. For a view of the way that Lauder’s campaign fits within the ‘cultural politics’ of the Jacobite rebellion, see J.C.D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 59–66.
5. Letter from Lauder to Ruddiman, Dundee, dated 4 September 1745; cited from Douglas Duncan, Thomas Ruddiman: A Study in Scottish Scholarship of the Early Eighteenth Century (Oliver & Boyd: Edinburgh, 1965), p. 159.