poet's biographers have shed tears
over the ten pounds that was all Milton ever received for his greatest
work; others, magnanimously renouncing the world on his behalf, have
rejoiced in the smallness of the sum paid him for a priceless work.
Lament and heroics are both out of place. London was a small town, and it
may well be doubted whether any modern provincial town of the same size
would buy up in eighteen months thirteen hundred copies of a poem so
serious and difficult and novel as _Paradise Lost_. Moreover, before the
close of the century, six editions had appeared, three of them in folio,
and so--judged by the number of editions--Milton's epic had outrun
Shakespeare's plays in popularity. The folio edition of 1695, with notes
and elucidations by one Patrick Hume, a Scottish scholar, appeared
fourteen years before Nicholas Rowe produced the first critical edition
of Shakespeare. The literary world quickly came to the opinion expressed
by Dryden in the year of Milton's death, that the _Paradise Lost_ was
"one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either
this age or nation has produced." Barely twenty years later the editors
of the _Athenian Mercury_ were asked to determine "Whether Milton and
Waller were not the best English Poets; and which the better of the two?"
Their verdict, reflecting, no doubt, the average opinion of the time, ran
thus: "They were both excellent in their kind, and exceeded each other,
and all besides. Milton was the fullest and loftiest; Waller the neatest
and most correct poet we ever had." Long before Addison wrote the papers
on _Paradise Lost_ in the _Spectator_, Milton had received full
recognition in the literary handbooks of that age. Langbaine, in his
_Account of the English Dramatick Poets_ (1691), takes notice of Dryden's
debts to _Samson Agonistes_, and, with an effort to be just, remarks of
Milton:--" Had his Principles been as good as his Parts, he had been an
Excellent Person." Sir Thomas Pope Blount, in his _De Re Poetica_ (1694),
and Bysshe in his _Art of English Poetry_ (1702), bear witness, in their
several ways, to Milton's great and assured fame. Indeed, Thomas Rymer,
of Gray's Inn, Esquire, who in 1677 had sneered at "that Paradise Lost of
Milton's which some are pleased to call a Poem," and William Winstanley,
who, in the _Lives of the Most Famous English Poets_ (1687), had remarked
of Milton that "his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and his