If Johnson is usually pilloried for misrepresenting Milton as a political subject, he has also been held responsible for caricaturing the private man, and, through the ‘Life of Milton’, transmitting that caricature down the centuries. Eighteenth-century caricatures of Johnson himself, such as James Gillray's portrayal of him wearing a dunce's cap, the apex of which bears Milton's name, turn the tables with the most graphic of insults. At a later date, Byron was to add his quota of tongue-in-cheek satire in Don Juan:

Byron's stanza divides neatly in half, swinging round the venerated Milton icon to display its humiliating obverse portrait. By including such ‘entertaining facts’ in this and other lives of the great and good, biographers claim to serve truth; but, though ‘most essential to their hero's story/ They do not much contribute to his glory’ (III. 92. lines 831–2). Johnson's own impression of the earlier lives of Milton is that they err in the opposite direction of excessive veneration, and that the balance needs to be redressed.