But the strangest sentence in this strange story has yet to be written, and Bishop Monk writes it as if it were a commonplace requiring no comment. "For a person who was neither a poet, nor possessed of poetical taste to venture upon such a task was no common presumption." The task was to detect every slip of language in Paradise Lost, and all instances of bad taste and incorrect imagery. The result was notoriously lamentable. Yet in what, we may ask, did it differ from those in which Bentley was held to have acquitted himself magnificently?