the early reception of paradise lost

© Blackwell Publishing 2004

Literature Compass 1 (2004) 17C 111, 1–13

The Early Reception of

Paradise Lost

William

Poole

New College, University of Oxford

Abstract

This essay discusses the early reception of John Milton’s

Paradise Lost

(1667),addressing in particular the materials accompanying the first publication of theepic, the first mentions of the epic in contemporary manuscripts, the literaryreaction of Dryden’s

The State of Innocence

, and the eighteenth-century commentarytradition, especially Richard Bentley’s notorious edition of 1732. The article alsoexplores some lesser-known reactions to Milton, including those of various earlyFellows of the Royal Society. Such a study demonstrates that Milton’s epic hasalways been seen as a difficult and potentially dangerous project, and that criticalmodels based on the influential but overgeneralized work of Stanley Fish founderin the face of genuine contemporary reactions to Milton. Accordingly, the moderncritical trend of reconstructing individual reactions to Milton, often from manuscriptsources such as correspondence or commonplace books, is to be preferred as themore secure method of analysing the reception history of Milton. Milton is, and

always was, a controversial figure.

Less than thirty years after its first publication, John Milton’s

Paradise Lost

received the honour of its own

seriatim

commentary, when in 1695 thepowerful London publisher Jacob Tonson brought out Patrick Hume’s

Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost

to accompany the sixth edition of thepoem.

1

It was the first substantial work in the vernacular so to be honoured.Tonson, who by 1690 had gained full ownership of the copyright of

ParadiseLost

, had commissioned Hume’s notes as part of his ongoing campaignboth to profit from and to promote Milton. This campaign, however, couldonly succeed if Tonson and his writers downplayed the Milton mostpeople remembered: Milton the political disgrace, the pseudo-senator, thedefender of divorce and regicide.

2

Better for their marketing strategy wasMilton the scriptural bard, the mixer of classical texts, existing in partialdislocation from the normal flow of history. As Hume’s subtitle explained,his commentary would – presumably in descending order of importance– point out the epic’s scriptural bases, elucidate its imitations of Homerand Virgil, paraphrase the difficult bits, and explain the hard words.

3

Milton, it seems, had arrived. When a lengthy commentary on a lengthypoem is composed and distributed from the centre of literary publishing,the parent text receives canonical blessing, standing now in final relation

2 The Early Reception of

Paradise Lost

© Blackwell Publishing 2004 Literature Compass 1 (2004) 17C 111, 1–13

not so much to immediate historical and political contexts as to long, literarytradition – what we might term a vertical over a horizontal order. As Hume’stitle-page inscription, adapted slightly inappropriately from Juvenal, stated:‘

Uni, cedit

MILTONUS,

Homero

, /

Propter Mille annos

’ – ‘Milton yields onlyto Homer, because of his antiquity’ (i.e. because Homer is so old).

4

Andfollowing Hume came the long eighteenth-century procession of com-mentators and expositors: Joseph Addison, Richard Bentley, Zachary Pearce,the Richardsons father and son, Francis Peck, Thomas Newton andHenry Todd.

5

Milton also exuded evangelical appeal: in 1748 John Wesleyincluded in his curriculum for the seventh class at Kingswood Schoolthe instruction ‘Transcribe and repeat select portions of Milton’. In 1763Wesley even produced an

Extract from Milton’s Paradise Lost With Notes

intiny duodecimo format which, as Marcus Walsh comments, functioned likea pocket Testament.

6

Milton had long prepared for an adulatory reception. Even in the politicalprose works of the 1640s he had manufactured occasion to air his ownpoetic ambitions, stating in

The Reason of Church Government

:

I began thus farre to assent both to them [his Italian friends] and divers of myfriends here at home, and not lesse to an inward prompting which now grewdaily upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portionin this life) joyn’d with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leavesomething so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.

7

When Milton came to republish his 1637 monody

Lycidas

in his firstcollection, the

Poems

of 1645, he announced his poetic, indeed vatic powerin a new headnote to the poem: ‘In this Monody the Author bewails alearned Friend, unfortunately drown’d in his Passage from

Chester

onthe

Irish

Seas, 1637. And by occasion foretels the ruine of our corruptedClergy then in their height.’

8

‘Foretels’ – Milton in 1637, so his 1645 selfadvertises, had providence of the intervening years, specifically of thefall of the clergy in the aftermath of the various anti-clerical legislations ofthe Long Parliament. Milton combines the poetic, the prophetic and thepolitical. Over two decades later, the first edition of

Paradise Lost

wouldexhibit the same mixture of projects. Thus Milton’s epic voice shunnednot to lament his Restoration lot ‘though fall’n on evil dayes, / On evildayes though fall’n, and evil tongues’ (7.25–6; references keyed to the 12-book edition); while ranked down the margins of the 1667 text, flankingthe verse, stood line-numberings in tens, bibliographically associating

ParadiseLost

with the cross-referenced classical texts of the scholar.Milton’s epic was far from unpopular upon its first appearance, although

the printer Samuel Simmons did change ‘John Milton’ to ‘J. M.’ in some laterimpressions of the first edition in order to obscure Milton’s authorship.Simmons also procured the Arguments, and the Note on the Verse, anangry swipe by Milton at ‘the troublesome and modern bondage of rhym-ing’. By 1669 Simmons had sold out of his initial run of 1,300 copies and



Paradise Lost

3

accordingly paid Milton the second £5 of his contract (£5 down payment;£5 upon sale of each of the first three impressions – a good deal forMilton, and arguably the first such contract).

9

Perhaps stung into actionby the threat of what

The State of Innocence

, Dryden’s rhymed compressionof

Paradise Lost

, might do to the market, Simmons produced a secondedition in 1674, now in twelve books, and by 1678 the total number ofthe various Simmons impressions in circulation was around 4,000.

10

The second edition of 1674 was also accompanied by two commend-atory poems, the first in Latin by Samuel Barrow (which had alreadyappeared in some of the remaining copies of the first edition), and a newone in English by Andrew Marvell. Barrow emphasizes Milton’s successfultake-over bid of classical literature – ‘Res cunctas continet iste liber’ (‘Thisbook contains everything’) – and ends on a call for the Greeks and Romansto give in: ‘Haec quicunque leget tantum cecinisse putabit/ Maeonidemranas, Virgilium culices’ (‘Anyone who reads this will think that Homerhad sung only of frogs, and Virgil of gnats’).

11

Likewise Marvell with awedexasperation felt that Milton had monopolized literature: ‘no room is herefor Writers left, / But to detect their Ignorance or Theft.’ But there is alsoworry at the theological propriety of Milton’s attempt:

. . . the ArgumentHeld me awhile misdoubting his Intent,That he would ruine (for I saw him strong)The Sacred Truths to Fable and old Song . . .

So right from the first publication of the epic, the political and thetheological were enduringly intertwined with the canonic. Milton may haveset himself up as the divine politician, but how would his readers cope withthat alloy? The following discussion therefore ranges over some of the moreproblematic reactions, notably that of Richard Bentley, before returningto scrutinize perhaps the most fascinating, unsettled and complex period ofMiltonic reception: the years between the first publication of the epic andthe close of the seventeenth century. Finally, a few comparisons withmodern critical trends are offered, and some words about where we are now.

***

Patrick Hume’s annotations were primarily expository, and left the textof Milton more or less alone. But the work of commentary and exposi-tion soon prompted more interventionist methods of editing. In 1725Elijah Fenton brought out an edition with extensively revised punctuationand also some suggestions for lexical substitutions. This, as Monk noted,may well have provided the prompt for the most notorious of all Miltoneditions – that of the great classical scholar Richard Bentley.

12

Bentley’s ‘edition’ of 1732 has attracted a huge deal of attention, nowas then.

13

Bentley set out to cleanse Milton’s text from the dirt that it had


Paradise Lost


accrued at a precise juncture – the space between Milton’s mind and theprinter’s shop. His declared hypothesis in his preface was that blind Miltonhad been misled by his amanuensis, an unscrupulous ‘Editor’ who meddledwith the text as it passed from Milton to the print house. Only this couldexplain its received state, full of illogical or ungrammatical statements,and prosodical blunders. Bentley did not actually intervene lexically withthe readings of his copy-text, the ‘Tickell’ edition of 1720 (all of these, ofcourse, still produced by Tonson); instead he lined the margins with hisown suggested emendations, provided copious footnotes, and italicizedthe more offensive sections obviously interpolated by the Editor. This lasttechnique decimated at least one book: Book 3 had to contend with theloss of lines 35–6, 381–2, 444–98, 535–7, 574–6, 597–612. Bentley’s ownworking copy with his manuscript notes shows that his printed editionactually stopped short of recording all his qualms with the text.

14

Bentley cannot quite have believed himself, if at all. As perhaps the bestof his modern analysts, Joseph Levine, has noted, Bentley’s actual foot-notes do not cohere with the strategy announced in Bentley’s preface,according to which Milton was technically pardoned for his offences, andhis Editor convicted instead. The footnotes, however, fail to maintainthis distinction, and this somewhat gives the game away: Bentley knew thatmuch of what he was ‘cleansing’ had always looked like that.

The further interest of his edition is that Bentley was departing fromthe methods that had made him famous. As a conjectural critic, Bentleyemended classical texts by drawing on a vast personal corpus of historicaland philological knowledge: his emendations depended on what todaywould be called historicism, and were not simply essays in circular reason-ing, in which a variant is preferred because it is better and better becauseit is preferred, the common parody of conjectural criticism (

ratio et res ipsa

,said Bentley – but whose

ratio

?). Bentley’s Milton,

pace

Bentley on theclassics,

is

such an essay, because Bentley’s revisions pay no attention tothe linguistic and ideological differences between Milton and Bentley.

15

Why might Bentley behave in such a fashion? What is immediatelyimportant is that Bentley felt the need to invent a scapegoat, as if Miltonwere too massive a target to attack without some cleverly designed rhetoricalshielding. Secondly, a vocabulary of restoration allowed Bentley some covertidentification with Milton, Bentley and the Christian Bard united againstthe unlettered hind who had befouled the original work.

16

But finally,Bentley did find some of Milton not up to Bentleyan standards. His venturewas by no means a mere hoax, the last Renaissance Paradox, and indeedBentley’s emendations of 7.321 and 7.451 have been received into the textcurrently in use. Bentley was both awed and exasperated by Milton,and consequently found a vehicle in which he could conserve and defileat the same time.

After Bentley, Milton’s text would never be safe, though as we saw,Bentley was not the first to emend. If commentary brought status, it also



Paradise Lost

5

brought scrutiny of a kind only just being brought to bear on Milton’spredecessor Shakespeare. Although Bentley was confuted both moderatelyand immoderately, his voice can still be heard in the later editors, some-times a little off the beaten path. Thus in Thomas Newton’s edition of

Paradise Regained

(1750), we find the Lincolnshire clergyman Mr. Calton,whose correspondence with Newton was copiously excerpted in Newton’scommentary, attacking not only Milton’s taste, but also his impliedtheology. Of

PR

1.122 ‘This man of men’, Calton judged: ‘The phrase islow and idiotic; and I wish the poet had rather written: This man,

ofHeav’n

attested Son of God.’ This is pure Bentley: fault, then revise.Pondering 1.163f, Calton explicitly accused Milton of Socinianism: ‘Nota word is said here of the Son of God, but what a Socinian would allow.His divine nature is artfully concealed under a partial and ambiguousrepresentation; and the Angels are first to learn the mystery of the incar-nation from that important conflict, which is the subject of this poem.’

17

This slow rumble of suspicion would erupt in the next century, when therediscovery of Milton’s

De Doctrina Christiana

in 1823 confirmed what ofnecessity the poetry quibbled: that Milton did not think that the Son ofGod was God (a position compatible with many nomenclatures, although‘Arian’ is the most accurate for Milton).

18

The ensuing row has not yet beenconcluded, nor is it likely to be while Milton occupies such a prominentliterary

rôle

. For some people it is bad enough that one of the centrepiecesof the English canon was penned by a radical supporter of what wouldretrospectively be classed as marginal politics; but to entertain the thoughtthat this might also apply to his theological beliefs threatened and stillthreatens a double disgrace. Because if Milton could look so virtuallyvirtuous in

Paradise Lost

without the lens of the

De Doctrina

, and so horriblyheretical with it, what does that imply about the structural relationshipbetween the orthodox and the heterodox, even the heretical? – and byextension, the conservative and the progressive, even the radical?

***

Bearing this thought in mind, let us return to the earliest years of

ParadiseLost

’s reception. If one assesses Milton’s impact by looking solely at printedworks, the story is of course rather skewed, because of the genres appropriateto print. Certainly, the influence of the epic has been traced in a numberof poetic productions, including potentially off-the-road texts such as thePlatonist John Norris’

Poems and Discourses

(1684), and the PhiladelphianJane Lead’s

Fountains of Glory

(1696).

19

And

Paradise Lost

was not just aninfluence but the explicit primary source for a number of works, includ-ing

Paradisus amissa

, a translation of the first book of the epic of ‘JohnMilton Englishman’ into Latin by ‘certain men of the same nation’ (1685).At the other end of the scale, one John Hopkins produced – insult ofinsults! – a rhyming version of books four, six and nine, for the benefit


Paradise Lost


of pretty heads unable to receive blank verse: ‘His work like the Tree ofKnowledge is Forbidden to the Ladies, to those I mean who would Tast theApples, but care not for Climbing to the Bough, and I have heard somesay,

Mr. Milton

in Rhyme would be a Fine thing.’

20

But Mr. Milton wasalready in rhyme, and far better than the tedious Hopkins could manage– Dryden’s notorious

State of Innocence

, a poem which was more popularthan its parent text in the first decades of its reception, going through teneditions to 1703 and circulating in numerous manuscripts.

Dryden’s poem is of necessity a high-speed venture, because the shiftfrom epic to drama erases the narrator’s leisurely commentary, leaving behindonly action, dialogue or soliloquy. But what is most important aboutDryden’s rewrite is that it interferes with the intellectual fabric of itssource. Whereas Milton’s Adam is very clever but happy to be told now andthen by Raphael to enquire no further, Dryden’s incarnation is a little toosmart, arguing the two angels that had been sent to quiet his mind backwhence they came. Milton’s Adam retires from conversation with Raphael‘clear’d of doubt’; at the parallel point in Dryden, his Adam complains‘Hard state of life! Since Heav’n fore-knows my will, / Why am I not ty’dup from doing ill?’ Again, Milton’s Eve may enjoy looking at her reflectionin water, but she is a far cry from Dryden’s plotting egotist, who decidesmoments after her creation that ‘I my self am proud of me’, and only sleepswith Adam to gain power over him.21 Were these beings ever innocent?Milton’s prize project ‘To justifie the ways of God to men’ lies in ruins inDryden; what is truly subversive, then, is not the rhyme, but the intellectualparody.

For other readers, neither Milton nor Dryden seemed acceptable.The non-juror Charles Leslie, for instance, in his History of Sin and HeresieAttempted (1698), lumped both together as equally impious:

The gravity and seriousness with which this subject ought to be treated, hasnot been regarded in the adventrous flight of Poets, who have dress’d Angelsin Armour, and put Swords and Guns into their Hands, to form romantickBattels in the Plains of Heaven, a scene of licentious fancy; but the Truthhas been greatly hurt thereby, and degraded at last even into a Play, whichwas design’d to have been acted upon the Stage: And tho’ once happilyprevented, yet it has pass’d the Press, and become the entertainment ofprophane raillery.22

This should serve as a crucial reminder that over the early period ofMilton’s reception, one basic issue of contention was not so much howwell Milton had performed, but if he should have performed at all.

This ambivalence is reflected in the very first reactions to Paradise Lost,and for these we need to turn to manuscript sources, usually correspondence.One such early letter is that of the old parliamentarian Sir John Hobart(1628–83) to a cousin in January 1668, immediately after Paradise Lostwent on sale. Hobart was very keen on the poem, remarking that it bore


The Early Reception of Paradise Lost 7

some resemblance to ‘Spencers way’. Milton, however, is still ‘a criminall &obsolete person.’23 More sustained attention came from John Beale (1608–83), a fascinating figure who read Milton carefully over an extended period.Beale, whose reactions to Milton were first fully analysed by Nicholas vonMaltzahn, was an ecclesiastic, F.R.S., and compulsive letter-writer – abulk of correspondence with men including Samuel Hartlib, Robert Boyle,Henry Oldenburg and John Evelyn survives, and a collected edition issorely needed.24 Beale is a hard man to pin down politically and reli-giously, not least because he tended to tell people what they wanted tohear: ‘one yt would say any thing in private yt would please his company,and any thing in pulpit that would please the times’, as one contemporarydeclared.25

Beale had been reading Milton for many years by the time Paradise Lostappeared, and indeed although he was broadly appreciative of Milton,he actually found the pre-Paradise Lost poetry better: ‘I conceive his firstInspirations to be purer & brighter, yn these his last.’ Beale did, however,defend Milton’s rhymelessness, accounting rhymed epic ‘but a Monkishsolecism’. And just before Paradise Lost was published, Beale was tellingJohn Evelyn that Milton was a dangerous talent in need of harnessing:‘Since we have lost Cowley, I wish we had a way to engage Milton uponsome honest argument. For though he be old & blind, he wilbe doingmischiefe if he be not engagd better, & he was long agoe an excellentPindariste: Good at all, But best at that straine, & too full of ye Devill.’26

Beale rather improbably wanted to enlist Milton’s poetic aid in defendingthe Royal Society, but this desire went hand-in-hand with the view thatMilton would have to be told how to behave himself, a naive wish. Mostinterestingly, Beale also found Paradise Lost blasphemous; as he wrote toEvelyn immediately following the publication of Paradise Regained/SamsonAgonistes: ‘Milton is abroad againe, in Prose, & in Verse, Epic, & Dramatic.I have not yet seen his History . . . He hath great faults in his Paradyse lostin his plea for our Original right, & in ye long blasphemies of Devils; Forwhich he hath no Authority, & they beget a bad, and afflict a good spirit.’27

This clearly bothered Beale, as he repeated the sentiment in 1681:

I have not yet known one Phanatic yt had a touch of true Poesy . . . OnlyMilton had a good smack; yet he mistakes ye maine of Poesy, to put such long& horrible Blasphemies in the Mouth of Satan, as no man yt feares God canendure to Read it, or without a poysonous Impression. Cowley in his Davideisallowed Satan but one Verse for his Blasphemy – And Satan, said he, spake therest in Lookes.28

The example of Beale is of particular critical importance because hiscollected references to Milton refute Stanley Fish’s repeated attempts todefine the ideal Miltonic reader as a robotically pious, rather dull Christian.Fish’s influential Surprised by Sin (1967) and his more recent How MiltonWorks (2001), turn on a (far from unreasonable) historical claim: that

8 The Early Reception of Paradise Lost


Milton’s seventeenth-century reader was both submissive and willing tobe corrected. That Milton himself was a radical and a heretic plays no partin this methodology; the ideal reader was not to be bothered by suchextraliterary concerns. Despite Fish’s association with reader-response theory,this thesis is a historical one, and must stand or fall on historical evidence.But Fish does not consult in any detail real early modern readers, andwhen they are consulted, it becomes obvious that Fish’s thesis fails.29

Balachandra Rajan was there long before Fish with his old but still veryreadable Milton and the Seventeenth-Century Reader (1947), and he is still tobe preferred.

Indeed, this can be confirmed by looking at more reactions fromthe men of science, who seem to have been guardedly keen on Milton,although the converse does not hold.30 Abraham Hill, for instance, thetreasurer of the Royal Society, put his finger on one of the most notorioussections of Paradise Lost and suggested an improvement:

Milton makes the cause of the Angels revolt to be when God declar[s] Christto be his son [i.e. PL 5.603–15] but it would have bin more poetical & moretrue that there revolt was upon the incarnation of Christ declared to them& so the humane nature prefered before the angelica[ l] to their greatdiscontent, Discours Pride the cause of heresy Milton a Socinian logic 132Iohn 12.331

What is additionally striking about this entry is that Hill tacks onto theend of his Paradise Lost comment (this is a commonplace book), a claimthat Milton was a Socinian, based on a careful reading of his Ars Logica.The reference is to book 1, chapter 32, and to the statement there that:‘I do not see why anyone should be offended that in an investigation ofthe exact truth and nature of things very meagre probative force is com-monly attributed to testimony, and that this applies to divine testimony aswell as to human.’32 This represents an active, shrewd, detailed and extensivereading of Milton; Hill is about as far from an unquestioning reader ascan be imagined, though he obviously considered Milton to be a writerof formidable stature.33 His scientific friends and F.R.S.s Robert Hookeand Francis Lodwick also owned quite a bit of Milton, both verse andprose, and Lodwick cannibalized material from Milton’s divorce tractsin order to write his own short piece in favour of divorce – hardly anorthodox spirit. Indeed, Milton would have paled had he known whatother notions this group of men, particularly Lodwick, were interested indiscussing – the pre-adamite heresy, that there were men before Adam,not a view compatible with Paradise Lost. Lodwick even wrote a utopiacalled A Country Not Named in which the Bible was banned from theutopian churches, and replaced instead with a digest of doctored extracts.The biblical accretions to Milton’s De Doctrina would have appeared quitebeside the point to Lodwick, who thought the Bible was a textuallysuspicious object, and a redaction of earlier works.34



***

I wish to conclude by offering some remarks on how this material mightor does inflect Milton studies. Twentieth-century work on Milton wasenduringly polemic because attacks on or defences of Milton frequentlyrested on very obvious ideological priorities. The most influential examplewas C. S. Lewis’ Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1941/1942), an eloquent workwhich desperately wanted Milton’s theology to be better behaved thanit was. Ripostes such as William Empson’s fiery Milton’s God (1961) weredriven by an equal and opposite desire to derail the central Miltonicproject – the justification of God’s ways to men. The godfather of modernMilton criticism is still the late Christopher Hill’s Milton and the EnglishRevolution (1977) because although literary critics have caught up with thehistorians and now routinely debunk or disown Hill, his overtly politi-cized, left-wing project still furnishes the field of what we find worthy todiscuss in Milton, where words like ‘radical’ and ‘subversive’ carry auto-matic critical value. Until recently, this produced an uncomfortable insti-tutional irony, whereby the study of radicalism was the new conservatismin seventeenth-century studies, although now attention is turning to theparallels or even links or reciprocities between so-called ‘orthodox’ and‘heterodox’ cultures.

Although the modern archival turn of allusion-hunting in manuscriptsmay look as if it does not have much to do with the old twentieth-century power struggle over Milton, I think that it is very often, anddesirably, a continuation of that struggle. It also seems that the Empsonside is winning. Concentration on the early readers of Milton is or shouldbe underpinned by the theoretical observations that Milton might not beentirely in control of his intellectual projects, and that his first readersmight identify this too. This, I contend, is a more sophisticated route totake than any available to those wishing to ‘orthodox’ Milton, for the verygood reason that the reception history of Paradise Lost does not bear outthe thesis that Milton was or is unassailable. Both as a theory of readingpractices, and as a theory of why historical contexts matter, modest allusion-hunting will get us further than any attempt to say that the De Doctrinais not all that unorthodox, or – desperate manoeuvre – irrelevant to thestudy of Paradise Lost (or even not written by Milton, as some have darklyargued). Thus, the type of approach represented by – to name only a fewexamples – the writers in Dobranski and Rumrich’s collection Milton andHeresy (1998), and by the pre-eminent analyst of the early reception ofMilton, von Maltzahn, seems to me to be locatable in the tradition ofregarding Milton as highly complex, and not easily or desirably reducibleto any one paradigm. This view of Milton, crucially, is also capable ofmaking a distinction between Milton’s apparent intentions, and theirliterary execution. What an adequate history of the reading of Paradise Lostand indeed the edition of Paradise Lost destined to succeed Fowler’s great



work will need to recognize, is that men like Beale and Empson havesomething in common, and that the Milton of C. S. Lewis and hisaccompanying Fish-style Reader are historical fictions – or perhaps them-selves now twists in the very history Lewis and Fish sought to write.

Notes1 K. Walker, ‘Jacob Tonson, Bookseller’, The American Scholar 61 (1992), pp. 424–30. An idealcomplement to this survey is R. Woof, H. J. M. Hanley and S. Hebron, Paradise Lost: The Poemand its Illustrators (Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust, 2004), which reproduces many pertinentdocuments and plates.2 W. R. Parker, Milton’s Contemporary Reputation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1940).3 P. Hume, Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost (London: Jacob Tonson, 1695).4 Adapted from Juvenal, Satires, 7.38. Unfortunately the original line applies to a patron-poetaster.5 A. Oras, Milton’s Editors and Commentators from Patrick Hume to John Henry Todd (1695–1801):A Study in Critical Views and Methods (Tartu: K. Mattiesen’s Buchdruckerei, 1930).6 M. Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997), p. 56.7 J. Milton, The Reason of Church Government Urg’d against Prelaty (London: John Rothwell,1641), p. 37.8 Poems of Mr. John Milton (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1645), p. 57.9 Facsimile in Woof et al., Paradise Lost, pp. 84–5.10 R. G. Moyles, The Text of ‘Paradise Lost’: A Study of Editorial Procedure (Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 15, 30; A. Fowler, ed., Paradise Lost (London: Longman, 1998),pp. 5–8; J. Raymond, ‘Milton and the Book Trade’ in A History of the Book in Britain, Volume 4:1557–1695, ed. J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),pp. 376–87.11 For Barrow see N. von Maltzahn, ‘ “I admird Thee”: Samuel Barrow, Doctor and Poet’,Milton Quarterly 29 (1995), pp. 25–8.12 J. H. Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, D.D., 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Rivington, 1833[1830] ), vol. 2, p. 309.13 There is a bibliography of discussion to 1980: M. M. Cohen and R. E. Bourdette, Jr.,‘Richard Bentley’s edition of “Paradise Lost” (1732): a Bibliography’, Milton Quarterly 14(1980), pp. 49–54. In addition to the studies of Oras, Walsh and Moyles, see also J. W. MacKail,‘Bentley’s Milton’, Proceedings of the British Academy 11 (1924–5), pp. 55–73; R. E. Bourdette,Jr., ‘ “To Milton lending sense”: Richard Bentley and “Paradise Lost” ’, Milton Quarterly 14(1980), pp. 37–49; D. Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986); J. M. Levine, ‘Bentley’s Milton: Philology and Criticism inEighteenth-Century England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), pp. 549–68; J. K. Hale,‘Paradise Purified: Dr. Bentley’s Marginalia for his 1732 edition of “Paradise Lost” ’, Transactionsof the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 10 (1991), pp. 58–74, and Hale’s notes in Milton Quarterly14 (1980), p. 131, and 18 (1984), pp. 46–50.14 Cambridge University Library Adv. b. 52. 12.15 For a sketch of Bentley’s editing in context, see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribesand Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 2nd ed. (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1974), pp. 166–70.16 C. Kendrick, ed., Critical Essays on John Milton (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), pp. 2–3.17 T. Newton, ed., Paradise Regained (Dublin: John Exshaw, 1754), ad loc. K. Hartwell, Lactantiusand Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 62, spotted Calton’s chargeof Socinianism.18 M. Bauman, Milton’s Arianism (Frankfurt: Lang, 1987); on the history of the De Doctrinamanuscript, see G. Campbell, T. N. Corns, J. K. Hale, D. Holmes and F. Tweedie, ‘TheProvenance of De Doctrina Christiana’, Milton Quarterly 31 (1997), pp. 67–117; for a summaryof the debate to date, see J. Rumrich, ‘The Provenance of De doctrina Christiana: A View of the



Present State of the Controversy’ in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, ed. M. R. Kelley,M. Lieb and J. Shawcross (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), pp. 214–33.19 J. T. Shawcross, Milton: A Bibliography for the Years 1624–1700 (Binghamton, NY: Medievaland Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984); Shawcross, Milton: A Bibliography for the Years 1624–1700: Addenda and Corrigenda (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,1990), nos. 1027A, 1494A (in Addenda).20 J. Hopkins, Milton’s Paradise Lost Imitated in Rhyme, in the Fourth, Sixth and Ninth Bookscontaining the Primitive Loves, The Battel of the Angels, The Fall of Man (London: Ralph Smith,1699), sg. A4r.21 J. Dryden, The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man: An Opera (London: Henry Herringman,1677), pp. 13, 26.22 C. Leslie, The History of Sin and Heresie (London: H. Hindmarsh, 1698), sg. A2r-v; Shawcross,Bibliography (1984), §1567.23 Bodleian MS Tanner 45*, fol. 271r, text in J. M. Rosenheim, ‘An Early Appreciation ofParadise Lost’, Modern Philology 75 (1978), pp. 280–2; sustained commentary in N. vonMaltzahn, ‘The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667)’, Review of English Studies 47 (1996),pp. 479–99.24 N. von Maltzahn, ‘Naming the Author: Some Seventeenth-Century Milton Allusions’, MiltonQuarterly 27 (1993), pp. 1–19; von Maltzahn, ‘Laureate, Republican, Calvinist: An EarlyResponse to Milton and Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies 29 (1993), pp. 181–98; von Maltzahn, ‘FirstReception’; M. Leslie, ‘The Spiritual Husbandry of John Beale’, in Culture and Cultivation inEarly-Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. M. Leslie and T. Raylor (Leicester/London:Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 151–72; W. Poole, ‘Two Early Readers of Milton: JohnBeale and Abraham Hill’, Milton Quarterly 38 (2004), pp. 76–99.25 Somerset Record Office, MS. DD/PH/205, Commonplace book of John Oliver, p. 72. Mythanks to Dr. Rhodri Lewis for this reference.26 British Library Add. MS 78312, letter 63 (31 August 1667).27 Add. MS 78313, letter 108 (24 December 1670).28 Add. MS 78313, letter 145 (9 March 1681).29 J. Rumrich, Milton Unbound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 10–23;C. Burrow, ‘Dead Wrong’, The Economist (16–22 June 2001), pp. 109–10; A. D. Nuttall,‘Everything Is Over Before It Begins’, London Review of Books, 21 June 2001; W. Poole, ‘How FishWorks’, Cambridge Quarterly 31 (2002), pp. 257–61. The only way to rescue the Fish hypothesisis to reclassify it as prescriptive. But nobody obeys academics.30 W. Poole, ‘Milton and Science: A Caveat’, Milton Quarterly 38 (2004), pp. 18–34.31 British Library MS Sloane 2894, fol. 70v.32 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1958–82), vol. 8, p. 319.33 Thus he collected anecdotes about Milton the man: ‘One hearing that Milton was blind saidtwas the only thing he had wanted of Homer’; ‘One visiting Milton. doe you not sometimereflect on your blindness as a judgment for your writing agst K. Charles &c. Milton I am blindSalmasius is dead wch is the greater judgment?’ (MS Sloane 2896, fol. 143r).34 Details on Hill, Hooke, and Lodwick can be found in Poole, ‘Milton and Science’ and Poole,‘Two Early Readers’.

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