SOURCE: Achinstein, Sharon. “Milton's Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden, and Literary Enthusiasm.” Huntington Library Quarterly 59, no. 1 (1997): 1-29.

In this essay, Achinstein compares Andrew Marvell's and John Dryden's responses to Paradise Lost in terms of the postrevolution issues of political and religious toleration.

No doubt but the thoughts of this Vital Lamp lighted a Christmas Candle in his brain. 

—The Transproser Rehears'd (1673)

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book,” Milton had written in 1644: the Restoration government saw fit to do both. Milton somehow escaped the death penalty after the Restoration, but his books did burn in bonfires throughout the summer and into the fall of 1660—one of many rituals that were part of the exhilaration and vehemence of the festivities greeting the new king and that purged the previous period into oblivion. The author judiciously went into hiding, where he lay perhaps “in darkness...