In Book VII of Paradise Lost Milton wrote:

Forthwith the Sounds and Seas, each Creek

and Bay
With Fry innumerable swarm, and Shoals
Of Fish that with their Fins and shining

Scales
Glide under the green Wave, in Schools that oft
Bank the mid Sea …

Our particular Fish and his school have been a promontory in the sea of Milton criticism since the publication of Surprised by Sin in 1967. Writing on literature, as on jurisprudence, Stanley Fish has attacked certain traits of liberalism, among them the assumption that we can transcend the immediate and historically contingent in order to scrutinize or evaluate the ethical bases of our actions. That being the case, it is puzzling that his new book—which is, in fact, largely a compilation of previously published articles, inadequately copyedited to eliminate repetition or streamline the argument—is so lacking in any sense of historical or biographical context. “In my story,” he claims, “agents are always and already situated”; since our wish to know, or act, other than we do, is doomed to fail, morality is a matter not of decision-making but of predetermination. Fish is, of course, free (or perhaps he would say he isn’t) to believe this depressing doctrine if he must, but the argument of his book is that Milton believed it too, and here there is room for disagreement.

Fish’s account of Milton’s mental world is initially set out with force and clarity. It is