David Masson is one of the great literary figures of the Victorian era: his corpus is large, rich in erudition, generously conceived, and finely executed. Aside from his imposing biography of John Milton (1859-1880), Masson composed book-length studies of Thomas Chatterton (serialized in the Dublin University Magazine, 1851; published in book form, 1874) William Drummond of Hawthornden (1873), Thomas De Quincey (1878), Thomas Carlyle (1885), and William Shakespeare (1914). In addition, he portrayed the lives and writings of scores of literary figures and historical characters, both major and minor, renowned and previously obscure.

Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft describe Masson as a "standard authority on Milton, [Oliver] Goldsmith, and De Quincey," and one might add the names of Carlyle, Chatteron, and Drummond. Aside from the sheer scale of his masterly biography of Milton, Masson's character is imposing in its own right; James M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan (1904), who was one of his...