| Sumario: | Bentley’s commentary on Milton’s Paradise Lost is an extraordinary work, which has attracted a wide range of verdicts from the critical community, mostly negative. Recent critics have tended to be more lenient towards Bentley than his contemporaries were, and it has been suggested that it was precisely the fact that Bentley was really a classicist that prevented him from dealing justly with Milton’s text. I argue, with examples, that this is a mistake: Bentley misunderstands a large number of Miltonic passages where the poet is deploying regular classical figures and techniques that Bentley ought to have recognized as such. I discuss some manuscript notes on Paradise Lost by Benjamin Stillingfleet which are relevant in this connection, and conclude with a more substantial illustration of Bentley’s misunderstanding of Milton’s classicism: a rhetorical figure much exploited by Horace appears in several places in Paradise Lost, but Bentley misses its presence both in Horace and in Milton.
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