Joseph Addison (1672-1719) Notes upon the twelve books of Milton’s Paradise Lost: Collected from the Spectator. (London: printed for a Company of Stationers, [1711]). Ff.4.5:2, pp.8-9.

Towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison’s prominent series of Saturday articles on Paradise Lost in the Spectator (at that time a daily paper) consolidated Milton’s reputation for a new age. In these essays, Addison judged Paradise Lost by the canons of Aristotle’s Poetics, pointing out for his readership those passages of the poem most to be admired, and which he judged superior even to Homer and Virgil.