Milton idealizes the reader, and to this idealization his many readers have often consented. In part this follows from the idealization of himself that so drove Milton's endeavours from an early age. His careers as teacher, pamphleteer, civil servant, and poet were all founded in his passion for learning - a college friend teased him about his 'inexcusable perseverance, bending over books and studies day and night', and he was later proud to recall 'that from my twelfth year scarcely ever did I leave my studies for my bed before the hour of midnight' (YP i: 337, 4: 612). Such learning he encourages his readers to share. Later literary and educational tradition made much of this legacy by giving Paradise Lost a central place in the canon, and finding in the epic a valuable store of cultural capital. But Milton exalts the reader in another still more compelling way: by setting his learning aside and, out of respect for individual reason, asking readers to experience wholly their being in the world in relation to the divine. Here his success is more difficult to chart, but finds expression in the rich diversity of responses to his works over the last four centuries.