His "Paradise Lost" (1732), suggested by Queen Caroline, has been criticised as the weakest of his work. He suggested that the poet John Milton had employed both an amanuensis and an editor, who were responsible for clerical errors and interpolations, but it is unclear whether Bentley believed his own position. A. E. Housman, who called him "the greatest scholar that England or perhaps that Europe ever bred" nevertheless criticised his poetic sensibility severely: "we are not all so easily found out as Bentley, because we have not Bentley's intrepid candour. There is a sort of savage nobility about his firm reliance on his own bad taste".