English Literature. England's isolation as an island has enabled her to develop a national literature continuously for nine centuries with only the slightest interruption from the world without. Foreign ideas have been introduced, certainly, but by Englishmen instead of by foreigners. Where a slothful race would have lain dormant and inactive, the vigorous and adventurous islanders have even led the way in two fields of literary endeavor, for fiction and the essay reached their successive stages of growth more quickly in England than elsewhere. Throughout poetry and prose, with but few exceptions, there is a blend of shrewdness and inspiration which in daily life is called common sense; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Browning continually sound the practical note, evincing their knowledge and appreciation of material affairs. Another trait is that of searching out the moral lessons in life and thought. "Books in the running brooks, sermons in stones" are constantly sought by English authors. Chaucer, Bunyan, Milton, Dickens, Carlyle, Browning, and many others from the forefront of English letters play the part of teacher and preacher again and again.
POETRY
Anglo-Saxon Literature
Arnold, M.
Blake
Browning, E. B.
Browning, R.
Burns
Byron
Chaucer
Clough
Coleridge
Dryden
Goldsmith
Gray
Henley
Keats
Kingsley
Macaulay
Milton
Morris, W.
Old English Ballads
Patmore
Pope
Rossetti, C.
Rossetti, D. G.
Scott
Shakespeare
Shelley
Sidney
Spenser
Swinburne
Tennyson
Wordsworth
FICTION
Austen
Barrie
Blackmore
Borrow
Brontë
Caine
Defoe
Dickens
Doyle
Eliot
Fielding
Gaskell
Goldsmith
Hardy
Hughes
Kingsley
Kipling
Lever
Lytton
Macdonald
Macleod
Malory
Meredith
Reade
Richardson
Scott
Stevenson
Swift
Thackeray
Watson
HISTORY
Carlyle
Creasy
Farrar
Freeman
Froissart
Froude
Gibbon
Gladstone
Green
Grote
Hodgkin
Holinshed
McCarthy
Mahaffy
Raleigh
Smith, G.
Symonds
BIOGRAPHY
Boswell
Chesterton
Evelyn
Lewes
Lockhart
Pepys
Southey
ESSAY
Addison
Arnold, M.
Bacon
Benson
De Quincey
Hamerton
Harrison
Hazlitt
Lamb
Lang
La Ramée
Macaulay
Milton
Morley
Pater
Ruskin
Sidney
Steele
Stephen
Stevenson
Thackeray
Walton
White, G.
HUMOR
Barham
Carroll
Cowper
Dickens
Gilbert
Hood
Hope
Jerrold
Sterne
Swift
Thackeray
TRAVEL
Hearn
Kinglake
Mandeville
Stevenson
Tyndall
DRAMA
Jonson
Marlowe
Shakespeare
Sheridan