Surprising though it may be to us that a man could become famous overnight simply by writing an essay on Milton, that is what happened to young Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1825. His contribution to The Edinburgh Review was hailed as the definitive refutation of Johnson’s notoriously grumpy attack in Lives of the Poets (1779). Macaulay’s case for Milton’s importance was easy to make, and remains powerful. For three hundred years, he has been among the acknowledged masters of English poetry and polemical literature, his significance recognized by admirers and detractors alike. His poetry has profoundly influenced many subsequent poets, even those who have reacted against it. He is the nearest thing to a classical poet to have written in English, our greatest practitioner of vernacular epic, and a central figure in the transmission of the fundamental narrative of Western culture. He is, in addition, a key participant in the political world of the English Revolution, a lodestar of the Parliamentary party who was lucky to escape execution after the Restoration. You may think his personality unappealing, his record as a husband and father unimpressive, his theology illiberal insofar as it is comprehensible at all, but can you call yourself an educated person if you have never read any Milton? There he is, a great fact, a great name in literary history.

Perhaps that is the point: literary history. For Macaulay did not have the last word. The criticisms of Johnson, and Eliot and Leavis after him,