Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d.

MILTON, John.

Item Number: 72021

London: Printed by John Baskerville for F. and R. Tonson, 1759.

Quarto, 2 volumes, with portrait frontispiece, contemporary calf, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. In very good condition with some rubbing to the extremities.

First published in 1667, “Paradise Lost is generally conceded to be one of the greatest poems in the English language; and there is no religious epic in English which measures up to Milton’s masterpiece… Milton performed an artist’s service to his God” (Magill, 511, 515). The writer and critic Samuel Johnson wrote that Paradise Lost shows off "[Milton's] peculiar power to astonish" and that "[Milton] seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others: the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful."