Readers of Milton have always understood the depth and breadth of his intellect. In the range of his references and in the penetrating discernment with which Milton deploys his vast learning, his works characteristically exhibit not only learnedness, but also knowingness. Even dyspeptic critics as given to harshness as Samuel Johnson must finally concede that Paradise Lost offers “a full display of the united force of study and genius; of a great accumulation of materials, with judgement to digest and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature or from story, from ancient fable or from modern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his thoughts.” In the memorable praise of William Hazlitt, “The quantity of art in him shews the strength of his genius: the weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other writer. Milton's learning has the effect of intuition.” His poetry and prose exude a scholarly disposition that both admirers and critics have come to recognize as a signature of his authorship.

As soon as one tries to describe the basis for the enormous confidence and authority of this scholarly persona, however, the air begins to leave the room. A portrait leaps to mind of an anemic pedant, perhaps of the sort exemplified by George Eliot's Edward Casaubon—vainly, tragically, and ironically compiling his doomed attempt at grand synthesis, The Key to All Mythologies. And yet, as our epigraph suggests, the unquestioned faith of the true believer can also mislead one to believe in a text's infinite elasticity, “expanding for whatever we can put into it,” so that “even bad grammar is sublime.” Uncritical admiration of an author, insufficiently tempered with knowledge of historical and theoretical contexts, can wed any of us to a scholarly position as precarious as that of Dorothea Brooke, the intelligent but naive heroine of Eliot’s masterpiece.