Milton’s Paradise Lost.

MILTON, John. Illustrated by Gustave Dore. Edited and with Notes and a Life of Milton by Robert Vaughan.

Item Number: 137019

New York, London, and Paris: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co, n.d.

Deluxe publisher’s quarto edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, illustrated by Gustave Dore. Quarto, original publisher’s deluxe full morocco binding elaborately stamped in blind and decorated in gilt, gilt inner dentelles, silk-watered endleaves, illustrated numerous plates by Gustave Dore. Edited and with Notes and a Life of Milton by Robert Vaughan, D.D. In near fine condition. Rare and desirable, a stunning example.

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). 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."