Snark, Victorian High Church edition
Although it wasn't necessarily a high-faluting scholarly success, J. H. Merle D'Aubigné's History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century proved exceptionally popular with evangelicals; some of my later Victorian novelists mention being indebted to it. One nonconformist wrote a sonnet in his honor:
Thirty-six nonconformist sonnets, by a young Englander By Thirty-six nonconformist sonnets
Incidentally, if you think that's a lousy sonnet, you have company.
Non-evangelicals, especially non-evangelicals with a dislike for Presbyterianism, were not quite so enthused. Here's the Christian Remembrancer, a High Church journal, on D'Aubigné's publishing methods (the sentence before this passage dryly observes that D'Aubigné is "not a little tedious in more ways than one"):
The Christian Remembrancer By Francis Garden, James Bowling Mozley