Books

London: Jacob Tonson John Poulson, 1732. 1st thus. leather. Good/no dustwrapper. 4to. frontispiece engravings Richard Bentley's infamous edition of Paradise Lost, roundly denounced by contemporary scholars, not to mention luminaries such as Swift and Pope; Bentley was a classicist of the highest reputation ('The greatest scholar that England ever bred' - AE Housman), producing numerous important academic works and editions of the classics, but by general consensus his Milton was regrettable; the preface outlines the shortcomings of earlier editions ('faults...in orthography, distinction by points, and capital letters) arguing they came about in part due to the failures of Milton's amenuensis (to whom the poet, being blind, dictated the work); a history of the manuscript follows, which Bentley describes as being 'polluted with such monstrous faults, as are beyond example in any other printed book', and a series of ill-defined personages are mentioned as having handled and published the…

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. The first version, published in 1667, consisted of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse.

The first edition of 'Paradise Lost' was published in 1667, and it consists of a small quarto volume which contains ten books in total.