A Brief Handbook of English Authors

BY OSCAR FAY ADAMS
BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1884
Copyright, 1883, By OSCAR FAY ADAMS. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge : Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Links to Author Name first letters
This brief handbook is intended simply for every-day use, when reference to larger works of the kind may not be convenient. Experience has proved that the small book which can be readily taken up is consulted far more frequently than the ponderous volume that requires great muscular exertion to lift.
In the world of letters as in the world of society conventionality plays no unimportant part, as every student of literature knows. That there is such a thing as conventional immortality every biographical dictionary yields abundant evidence. Even so small a work as this must necessarily contain many names that have achieved this conventional immortality through the accident of circumstance. Some literary fames are among the legacies left by preceding centuries to the present one to account for and explain. And when all is said, the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy and dealeth with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.
OSCAR FAY ADAMS.
Erie, Pa., October 28, 1883 .
Abbott, Edwin A. 1838 ——. Shakespearean scholar. Author of a Shakespearean Grammar, a Handbook of Elizabethan English, etc. Pub. Mac. Rob.
A'Becket, Gilbert Abbot. 1811–1856. Humorist. Author Comic Hist. of England, Comic Hist. of Rome, Comic Blackstone, etc. Pub. Apl. Lip.
Adams, Mrs. Sarah (Flower). 1805–1848. Known chiefly by her hymn, Nearer, my God, to Thee.
Adams, Wm. 1814–1848. Religious writer. Author of Sacred Allegories, etc. See Edition of 1869, with Life. Pub. Lip.