It has been, on the whole, though there are exceptions, the habit to regard Milton as a proud Puritan—having at best a certain nobility and at worst a noxious inhumanity. Every incident of his life has been interpreted on this basis. His irritations and his faults have been petrified into a great range of mountains down which no rivers of living waters rushed. He must be always granite, and at that not the granite of charity but of solitary haughtiness and hate. He could perhaps show us how to endure, but not how to love. One might think he had gone blind on principle and with an august masochism perversely preferred the return of the Stuarts. It is true he preferred his principles to his sight, and that he made great poetry out of the defeat of his cause. But he never forgot that sight was normal, that good was somehow victorious beauty, that romantic love was a wonder of grace and authority and delight, and that laughter was one of the divinest virtues allowed to man.

—Charles Williams, “The New Milton”