“To proceed to a consideration of the merits of Paradise Lost,…I shall try to explain at once the foundation of the interest belonging to the poem.…In a word, the interest of the poem arises from the daring ambition and fierce passions of Satan.…The two first books alone are like two massy pillars of solid gold.”
— William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818)
The Romantic Reading of Paradise Lost’s Infernal Books
On the 1802 Edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost