The text comes Book I of from Milton's Paradise Lost: A New Edition, by Richard Bentley, D.D. (London, 1732). My textual policy has been conservative: Bentley's emendations force a modern editor to be terribly self-conscious about all attempts to tinker with another's text. Only a few obvious misprints have been corrected; all are recorded below.
The Preface is transcribed verbatim, although I have added paragraph numbers for easy reference.
In the text of Paradise Lost itself, I've tried to preserve Bentley's formatting as closely as the limitations of HTML allow. Since the Web doesn't encourage breaking a text into pages, and since Bentley's apparatus is linked to his text in several complicated ways, I've put a small "NOTE" icon next to each verse that bears an annotation. The text is available in two versions: one separates the text and the notes into two frames, and is best suited to reading on-line; the other runs the text and notes together into one long file, and is suitable for printing or browsers that don't support frames.
In the transcription, Greek letters have been transliterated — perhaps not always accurately; I confess my knowledge of Greek paleography isn't what it should be. I'll try to fix bugs as I find them, but welcome corrections from those who know better.
I've made only the following minor emendations:
My own errors doubtless remain. I'll be grateful to hear about them.