Psalmanazar, GEORGE, 'the Formosan,' was born probably in Languedoc, between 1679 and 1685. Educated by monks and Jesuits at Avignon and elsewhere, he at sixteen turned vagabond, and for two or three years wandered through France, Germany, and the Low Countries, by turns an 'Irish pilgrim,' a 'Japanese convert,' a waiter, a 'heathen Formosan,' and a soldier. At last at Sluys he found a ready accomplice in one Innes, chaplain to a Scottish regiment, who baptised him 'George Lauder' after the governor, brought him over to London, and introduced him to Bishop Compton. For that credulous prelate he translated the Church Catechism into the 'Formosan' language; and to him he dedicated his Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704), which found many believers in spite of its patent absurdities, such as that Formosa belonged, not to China, but Japan, and that the hearts of 18,000 boys were sacrificed every new year. The bishop sent him for six months to Oxford, and for a while he was lionised by the highest in the land. In spite, however, of his eating raw meat and enormous quantities of pepper and opium (an opium-eater he continued to the last), people gradually lost faith in him, or the novelty wore off, or by Law's Serious Call (1729) he was converted to a sense of the error of his ways. Anyhow, we find him the alleged importer of a white 'Formosan' enamel, a tutor, a regimental clerk (1715-17), a fan-painter, and lastly, for years a diligent hack-writer for the publishers. The Universal History was largely of his compiling; and his, too, a popular Essay on Miracles. But in all his strange life there is nothing stranger than the esteem expressed for him by Samuel Johnson. He was the man he 'sought after most,' 'the best man he ever knew,' a man whom 'he would as soon think of contradicting as a bishop,' and whose 'piety, penitence, and virtue exceeded almost what we read of as wonderful even in the lives of the saints.' An old man of fourscore years, he died in London on 3d May 1763.
See the autobiographical Memoirs of * * * * * commonly known by the name of George Psalmanazar (1764), and articles in Temple Bar (1865) and the Cornhill (1879).