John Milton (1608–1674) Milton’s Paradise lost. A new edition, by Richard Bentley, D.D. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1732). Ee.2.8, pp. 78–79.

In 1732, the classical scholar Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, produced an ‘emended’ edition of Paradise Lost. Bentley argued that the poem’s existing text had been corrupted either by its publisher Simmons or by an unknown amanuensis to whom Milton had entrusted his manuscript. Bentley’s pedantic and literal-minded revisions, aimed at restoring the poem’s ‘lost’ text, provoked outrage among his contemporaries. Alexander Pope, for example, numbered Bentley among the literary dullards of his Dunciad (1728). This copy of Bentley’s edition bears the indignant marginalia of the poet Wiliam Cowper (1731-1800), who here pours scorn on the editorial conjectures.