Milton began his great epic in 1658, and is said to have finished it in 1663. It was licensed after some delay, occasioned by the hesitation of the deputy of the Archbishop of Canterbury over the lines:
"As when the Sun, new ris'n
Looks through the Horizontal Misty Air
Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon
In dim Eclips, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the Nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes Monarchs."
He may, as Professor Masson has pointed out, have had difficulty in finding a publisher able and willing to venture upon the printing of a work by one "whose attacks on the Church and defenses of the execution of Charles I. were still fresh in the memory of all, and some of whose pamphlets had been publicly burnt by the hangman after the Restoration." Few probably of those whose shops had centered around Paul's Churchyard, the very heart of the book-trade, could have done so, for they were, if not ruined, certainly inconvenienced by the loss of their stock and shops in the Great Fire of the year before. It is small wonder that Simmons, to whom, through some agency or other, the poet did come, drove a hard bargain when the agreement for the copyright was entered into, April 27, 1667. The original of this agreement came into the possession of the Tonsons, the proprietors of the copyright, and was finally presented to the British Museum by Samuel Rogers, who acquired it from Pickering the publisher. "Milton was to receive 5 l. down, and 5 l. more upon the sale of each of the first three editions. The editions were to be accounted as ended when thirteen hundred copies of each were sold 'to particular reading customers,' and were not to exceed fifteen hundred copies apiece. Milton received the second 5 l. in April, 1669, that is 15 l. in all. His widow in 1680 settled all claims upon Simmons for 8 l. and Simmons became proprietor of the copyright, then understood to be perpetuated."
The book made its appearance at an unfortunate time. London had barely recovered from the Plague of 1665 (during which eighty printers had died, wherein is seen another reason for the difficulty in finding a publisher), and the great district devastated by the Fire was still only partly rebuilt. It was not surprising that the 1200 copies which are thought to have made the first edition did not have a brisk sale; these were not exhausted for at least eighteen months, and a second impression was not put out for four years.
The copies of the first printing may be divided into several classes, according to the title-pages they bear. These all differ from one another in several more or less important particulars, but the text of the work is identical in all cases, except for a few typographical errors. Two titles, supposed to be the earliest, were Licenſed and Entred according | to Order, and have the imprint: