Now that the semester is over, I am plugging away on my volume on Paradise Lost for Princeton’s Lives of Great Religious Books series. Right now I’m writing about Milton’ reputation during his own lifetime, and several times I have come across a delicious quotation from his fellow poet Edmund Waller, who wrote in a letter that “the old, blind schoolmaster, John Milton, hath published a tedious poem on the Fall of Man — if its length be not considered a merit, it hath no other.” Delicious! But: the quotation may not be authentic. I have been working diligently to track it down, and as far as I can discover, the first time it appears is in an 1811 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine, in an article about Anna Seward, a poet who had recently died: 

(History, I think it’s fair to say, has not seconded Seward’s comparison of Milton and Southey.) I’ve looked for Waller’s letters, and while some survive - he had an interesting correspondence with Thomas Hobbes — I can’t find one that contains this quotation. I’m almost tempted to use it anyway and if challenged plead ignorance; it would make such an excellent epigraph to the chapter I’m writing.