That eight biographies of John Milton were written within sixty years of his death in 1674 not only demonstrates the popularity of his works during the first half of the eighteenth century, but also suggests the enduring strength of Milton's personality. Because most of these accounts were published with editions of Milton's works, readers became accustomed to interpreting his writings biographically. Milton still had his detractors - William Winstanley in his 1687 dictionary of English poets, for example, dismissed Milton as 'a notorious Traytor' who had 'most impiously and villanously bely'd that blessed Martyr, King Charles the First' (195) - but such attacks only encouraged readers to approach Milton's works as a function of his identity. As Samuel Johnson complained in his Lives of the English Poets, the 'blaze' of Milton's reputation was preventing people from examining his poetry objectively (1: 163, 165).