Table of Contents

Volume 1: Preface; 1. Various authors - Percy's Reliques; 2. Irish authors - Thomas Davis, John Banim; 3. Authors associated with places - Thomas Noel; 4. Old authors - Abraham Cowley; 5. Comic poets - J. Anstey; 6. American poets - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; 7. Authors sprung from the people - Thomas Holcroft; 8. Authors associated with places - Beaumont and Fletcher; 9. Fashionable poets - Winthrop Macworth Praed; 10. Peasant poets - John Clare; 11. Authors associated with places - Samuel Johnson; 12. Old poets - Robert Herrick, George Withers; 13. Female poets - Joanna Baillie, Catherine Fanshawe; 14. Married poets - Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning; 15. Prose pastorals - Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia, Isaac Walton's Complete Angler. Volume 2: 1. Spanish ballads; 2. Female poets - Miss Blamire, Mrs. James Gray; 3. American orators - Daniel Webster; 4. Old authors - Ben Jonson; 5. Fashionable poets - William Robert Spencer; 6. Autobiography of dramatic authors - Colley Cibber, Richard Cumberland; 7. Female poets - Mrs. Clive, Mrs. Acton Tindal, Miss Day, Mrs. Robert Dering; 8. Cavalier poets - Richard Lovelace, Roger l'Estrange, The Marquis of Montrose; 9. Poetry that poets love - Walter Savage Landor, Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats; 10. Authors associated with places - Christopher Anstey; 11. American poets - John Greenleaf Whittier, Fitz-Greene Halleck; 12. Voluminous authors - Hargrave's State Trials; 13. Fishing songs - Mr. Doubleday, Miss Corbett; 14. Authors associated with places - John Kenyon. Volume 3: 1. Authors associated with places - Thomas Chatterton, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth; 2. American poets - Oliver Wendell Holmes; 3. Letters of authors - Samuel Richardson; 4. Fine single poems - Sir Walter Scott, &c.; 5. Authors associated with places - W. C. Bennett; 6. Irish authors - Gerald Griffin; 7. Mock-heroic poetry - John Hookham Frere; 8. Authors associated with places - Lord Clarendon, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Hughes; 9. Unrecognised poets - George Darley, the Rev. Edward William Barnard; 10. American prose writers - Nathaniel Hawthorne; 11. Old poets - Andrew Marvel; 11. Scottish poets - William Motherwell; 13. Great prose writers - Lord Bacon, John Milton, Jeremy Taylor, John Ruskin.

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Delightfully detailed and surprisingly witty, this 1852 publication offers an eclectic mix of fiction, literary analysis and autobiography.