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xii only vindicated his use of blank verse, but claimed it as one of his highest services to literature to have ventured on that experiment, and demanded for his Paradise Lost, however "vulgar readers" might cavil, the special credit of being "an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing." Simmons, having received the prose argument and this prefatory paragraph, together with a list of some Errata that had been detected in the text of the poem, was at the trouble of printing all in the form of fourteen new pages of matter, to come between the title-page and the text in all future issues of copies. He introduced the additions by a note of four lines in his own name, thus: "The Printer to the Reader. Courteous Reader, There was no Argument at first intended to the Book, but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, is procured.—S. Simmons." The fourteen pages of additional matter with this note of introduction had been printed off, and inserted into a good many copies sent out for sale with the fifth title-page, before the bad grammar of Simmons's note attracted Milton's attention. When it did so, he amended Simmons's note for him thus: "The Printer to the Reader. Courteous Reader, There was no Argument at first intended to the Book, but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, I have procur'd it, and withall a reason of that which stumbled many others, why the Poem Rimes not.—S. Simmons." This amendment was adopted by Simmons, and there are copies of the fifth title-page issue with the amended and extended form of his note; but, as he retained copies of the sheet that had been printed off with the shorter and ungrammatical form of that note, it is a matter of chance whether in any copy of the First Edition of Paradise Lost that left the binder's late in 1668, or early in 1669, there shall be found the one form of Simmons's note or the other. All such copies, however, differ from preceding copies in having the fourteen pages of prefatory prose matter inserted between the title-page, whatever form it takes, and the beginning of the poem itself. The issue of the set of copies with the fifth title-page in 1668, therefore, marks an epoch in the early history of the book.