Milton Preferred Old Books

    That he read many of the moderns is improbable, since he nowhere alludes to them. Ben Jonson, we know he reverenced, though he was never “sealed of his tribe”; William Browne and the Fletchers and other Spenserian-pastoral poets influenced him; but the literary crowd that hung round the court and stage he probably troubled little about. They went their way, and he his. Deep in the Greek and Latin, medieval and Elizabethan writers, he could spare little time, and had little taste, for the moderns.

Rose Macaulay, Milton (London: Duckworth, 1934), pp. 36-37.