Showing posts with label 1836. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1836. Show all posts

Tuesday

Acquisitions (144): Diamond Cabinet Editions


Jones's Diamond Cabinet Editions of Select British Poets. 4 vols (c.1836)
[All photos of this set are by Bronwyn Lloyd]

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Jones & Co. / Late Lackingtons: The Temple of the Muses (Finsbury Square)

Diamond Cabinet Editions of Select British Poets (c.1836)
[purchased David Thomas Bookshop, Lorne St, Auckland CBD - 6 August 1980]:


Jones's Diamond Cabinet Editions of Select British Poets. 4 vols (c.1836)

Diamond Cabinet Editions of Select British Poets. 4 vols. London: Jones & Co., 1827-1835.
  1. Comprising in One Volume The Works of Milton, Cowper, Goldsmith, Thomson, Falconer, Akenside, Collins, Gray.
  2. Comprising The Works of Kirke White, Burns, Beattie, Shenstone, Gay’s Fables, Butler’s Hudibras & Select Works of Lord Byron.
  3. Comprising Moore [sic.], Pope, Watts, Hayley, Mason, Prior, Grahame & Logan.
  4. Comprising Dryden, Littleton [sic.], Hammond, Richardson, Charlotte Smith, Canning, Gifford, Bloomfield’s Farmer’s Boy &c.

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Diamond British Poets - Diamoond Classics: Miniature Travelling Library (London: Jones & Co., 1824-1835)

Travelling Editions


So it seems that, rather than filling trunks and packing cases with miscellaneous volumes of verse and prose, the well-organised traveller in the 1820s and 30s could instead invest in a compact library of books guaranteed to satisfy all tastes. The handsome set pictured directly above included the following 50 titles, arranged below according to their date of publication in this form:
  1. 1824 – Samuel Butler: Hudibras, a Poem
  2. 1825 – John Dryden: The Poetical Works, Vol I.
  3. 1825 – John Dryden: The Poetical Works, Vol II.
  4. 1825 – James Grahame: The Sabbath &c.
  5. 1825 – Matthew Prior: The Poetical Works, Vol. I.
  6. 1825 – Matthew Prior: The Poetical Works, Vol. II.
  7. 1825 – John Dryden: The Works of Virgil [2 vols in one]
  8. 1826 – Lord Lyttleton: The Poetical Works
  9. 1826 – William Somervile: The Chase
  10. 1826 – Edward Young: The Complaint, or Night Thoughts
  11. 1827 – Robert Bloomfield: The Farmer’s Boy
  12. 1827 – David Lester Richardson: Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems
  13. 1827 – Charlotte Smith: Elegiac Sonnets
  14. 1828 – Gifford’s Baviad & Mæviad &c.
  15. 1828 – Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto
  16. 1830 - William Hayley: The Triumphs of Temper
  17. 1830 – Alexander Pope: The Poetical Works, Vol. I.
  18. 1830 – Alexander Pope: The Poetical Works, Vol. II.
  19. 1830 – Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels [2 vols in one]
  20. 1830 – Isaac Watts: Horæ Lyricæ: Poems Chiefly of the Lyric Kind
  21. 1831 – Demosthenes: The Orations, Vol. I.
  22. 1831 – The Orations of Demosthenes, Vol. II.
  23. 1831 – Mark Akenside: The Poetical Works
  24. 1831 – William Collins: The Poetical Works
  25. 1831 – John Gay: Fables and Other Poems
  26. 1831 – William Mason: The English Garden
  27. 1832 – Francis Bacon: Essays: Moral, Economical and Political
  28. 1832 – George Canning: The Poetical Works
  29. 1832 – William Cowper: Poems, Vol. I.
  30. 1832 – William Cowper: Poems, Vol. II.
  31. 1832 – Oliver Goldsmith: The Poetical Works
  32. 1832 – Thomas Gray: The Poetical Works
  33. 1832 – John Langhorne: Theodosius and Constantia
  34. 1832 – Hannah More: Sacred Dramas
  35. 1832 – Saint-Pierre: Paul and Virginia & The Indian Cottage
  36. 1833 – Robert Burns: Poetical Works, Vol I.
  37. 1833 – Robert Burns: Poetical Works, Vol II.
  38. 1833 – George Crabbe: The Village &c.
  39. 1833 – W. Dodd: The Beauties of Shakespeare
  40. 1833 – Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield
  41. 1833 – William Shenstone: The Poetical Works
  42. 1833 – Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey
  43. 1834 – [Goethe]: The Sorrows of Werter [Werther]
  44. 1834 – John Milton: Paradise Lost, Regained &c.
  45. 1834 – The Poetical Remains of Henry Kirke White
  46. 1835 – James Beattie: The Minstrel &c.
  47. 1835 – Madame Cottin: Elizabeth; or the Exiles of Siberia &c.
  48. 1835 – William Falconer: The Shipwreck
  49. 1835 – Samuel Johnson: Rasselas: A Tale
  50. 1835 – James Thomson: The Seasons

Jones & Co.: Diamond British Poets & Classics (1823-1831)


The 14 titles marked in bold above are those not included in my own compact 4-volume set of "Select British Poets", a compilation of previously published texts which I've tentatively dated to 1836 - despite the "1827" date on the main title-page - because of the following inscription, repeated on the flyleaf of each volume:




Katherine Anne Emily Cecilia
Somerset
From her affectionate Brother Richard
Janu[uar]y 1st, 1837

Thanks, Richard - a generous gift indeed! Each volume is priced at 10s 6d cloth, 12s silk, so these four cloth-bound books together with their box must have set him back at least 42 shillings: two whole guineas, in fact. And they clearly were read, as some (few) annotations and underlinings can be spotted here and there. There's some highlighting too, which presumably dates from a later era.

With only three exceptions - Young's Night Thoughts, Crabbe's The Village and Dodd's The Beauties of Shakespeare - the excluded works were all in prose, which presumably explains their omission from this set of purely poetry volumes. I suspect that the absence of Young's and Crabbe's very popular long poems may have been due to copyright issues, but that's really just a guess.
Jones & Co.: Diamond British Poets. Diamond Classics (1823-1831)

Jones published a Diamond Poets series and a Diamond Classics series. Most known sets combine the two series and are commonly called the "Jones Diamond Classics" ... Each volume contains an engraved frontispiece of the author and an engraved title page. There were reportedly 53 volumes issued altogether between 1823 and 1831, so some complete sets were assembled over time, but ... it is clear that the case was only ever intended to hold 50 volumes. Authors include Burns, Dryden, Swift, Milton, Cowper, Johnson, Pope, and Byron, among others:
As far as size goes, my four volumes are a little larger than the (16mo?) one pictured above, but are still in pocket format, with extremely tiny print. Each of my volumes is roughly 180 mmm high x 112 mm wide, which puts them more in the 12mo range.




The (once) sturdy cardboard box they're housed in is roughly 192 mm high x 122 mm wide. It's missing the protective lid which I suspect must once have been present to guard them from the stresses and strains of travel. The contents labels on the backs of each volume were printed by Glasgow University Press, so perhaps they, too, were involved in the production somehow.


Jones's Diamond Cabinet Editions of Select British Poets. 4 vols (c.1836)


It's thought that they were originally intended to rival William Pickering's Diamond Travelling Library Series, a set of "tiny (4.5 x 2.75 ins) editions of Horace, Milton and Whatnot, printed in diamond [4.5 pt] type ..."
In 1821 [Pickering] began issuing the popular series of “Diamond Classics,” miniature books set in tiny 4.5 point type and offered in a cloth or leather binding at an affordable price of six shillings. The series, which continued through 1831, was so successful that collectors sometimes had their volumes rebound by society bookbinders such as Charles-François Capé ... This collection includes the following Diamond Classics: Catullus (1824), Cicero’s De Officiis and other works (1821), Dante (2 vols., 1822), Homer’s Iliad (1831), Homer’s Odyssey (1831), Horace (1826), Petrarch (1822), Tasso (vol. 2 only, 1822), Terence (1822), and Virgil (1821).
11 volumes, 24mo (84 x 46mm). Uniformly bound in maroon morocco gilt:

William Pickering: Diamond Classics (1821-31)



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Jones & Co.: The Temple of the Muses (Finsbury Square)


The publisher, too, is of considerable interest. The British Museum listings for Jones & Co. date the firm as being active between 1822 and 1850, which certainly fits in nicely with the dates of that 50-volume travelling library, as well as my four-volume compact set of poets. The addresses given for them are as follows:
3 Warwick Square, London
3 Acton Place, Kingsland Road (1828)
32 Finsbury Place, Moorfields
Temple of the Muses, Finsbury Square (in 1830, 1831, 1832 and 1836)
And this is the appended biography:
Booksellers and print publishers. Published 'The National Gallery of Pictures by the Great Masters' in the 1830s ... Took on the famed 'Temple of the Muses' in Finsbury Square which had been run by Lackington & Co, as can be seen in a view of the building lettered as 'Jones and Compy. / Late Lackingtons'.
A recent blogpost on Jane Austen's London describes the building's appeal as follows:
Billed as the “Cheapest Bookseller in the World,” the Temple of Muses enjoyed a reputation as being one of the biggest booksellers of the day. Run by Lackington Allen & Company at No. 32, Finsbury Place South, in Finsbury square from 1778-1798, the book store would publish catalogs ranging from twelve thousand to over thirty thousand titles ...
The shop frontage was one hundred and forty feet long, making it one of the tourist sites to see in London. The middle of the shop posted an enormous circular counter, large enough that it was said that a mail coach and four (or six, depending upon the account) could be driven around it. A wide staircase led to ‘lounging rooms’ and galleries of bookshelves, which were rather unusual in the day. Usually booksellers kept their wares solely behind the counter where only the clerks had access. As patrons climbed to higher floors, the books become “shabbier” ... but cheaper.
The books published here included the first, anonymous edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.


Anon. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
(London, Finsbury Square: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818)



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Carl Spitzweg. English Tourists in the Campagna (c.1835)


I suppose what interests me most about these cabinet editions is the insights they give into what English people abroad - and at home - were reading in 1820s and 1830s. Most of the poetry here dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The sole concession to the Romantics is the inclusion of a few early poems from Byron's Hours of Idleness & English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. There's no Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, or Wordsworth - let alone William Blake!

The prose classics included seem even more staggering as a traveller's sole vade mecum: The only classical text is The Orations of Demosthenes - though that may be because that market had already been scooped by William Pickering (as well as his Greek and Latin library, he was also responsible for the 50-odd volume Aldine Poets series). I suppose that Demosthenes is here as a useful source of pithy maxims, like Francis Bacon's Essays: Moral, Economical and Political and the Rev. William Dodd's The Beauties of Shakespeare. The novels mostly date from the 18th century. They include Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Dr. Johnson's Rasselas, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Swift's Gulliver’s Travels, and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto.

But there are also a few works in translation: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's sentimental romance Paul et Virginie and Goethe's rather racier Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Werter (sic.)]. I hadn't heard previously of Madame Cottin's Elisabeth ou les Exilés de Sibérie [Elizabeth; or the Exiles of Siberia], but no less a source than Nuttall's Encyclopaedia assures us that it's a "wildly romantic but irreproachably moral tale."

Nor had I heard of John Langhorne's Theodosius and Constantia - full title "The Correspondence between Theodosius and Constantia from their first acquaintance to the departure of Theodosius, now first published from the original manuscripts, by the Editor of 'The Letters that passed between Theodosius and Constantia after she had taken the Veil'" (1763-64). This rather ponderous fiction apparently delighted our ancestors more than it does us. Again: there's no Jane Austen, no Fielding, no Smollett - and no Walter Scott (though of course the author of the Waverley novels was still 'the great unknown' until his identity was finally revealed in 1827).

All of which brings us to the actual contents of my own four volumes of assorted poets:



NB:
  • Each surname is reproduced from the book-spine
  • The title and date of each work is taken from its title-page inside the volume
  • Surnames in [square brackets] are not listed on the spine, but are included inside;
  • Titles in bold are not also included in the 50-volume set above.

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    Jones's Diamond Cabinet Editions of Select British Poets (vol. I)

    Volume I

  1. Milton
    • The Poetical Works of John Milton: Complete in One Volume (1835)
  2. Cowper
    • Poems by William Cowper, Esq. (1832)
  3. Goldsmith
    • The Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B. (1832)
  4. Thomson
    • James Thomson: The Seasons; A Poem (1831)
  5. Falconer
    • William Falconer: The Shipwreck; A Poem (1831)
  6. Akenside
    • The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, M.D. (1831)
  7. Collins
    • The Poetical Works of William Collins (1831)
  8. [Somervile]
    • William Somervile: The Chase, and Other Poems (1831)
  9. Gray
    • The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray (1832)

    10. Frontispiece (vol. I)



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    Diamond Cabinet Editions of Select British Poets (vol. II)

    Jones's Diamond Cabinet Editions of Select British Poets (vol. II)

    Volume II

  10. Kirke White
    • The Poetical remains of Henry Kirke White of Nottingham, Late of St. John's College, Cambridge (1831)
  11. Burns
    • The Poetical Works of Robert Burns; as Collected and Published by Dr. Currie; with Additional Poems (1829)
  12. Beattie
    • James Beattie: The Minstrel; and Other Poems (1828)
  13. Shenstone
    • The Poetical Works of William Shenstone (1831)
  14. Gay’s Fables
    • John Gay: Fables and other Poems (1832)
  15. Butler’s Hudibras
    • Samuel Butler: Hudibras, A Poem (1829)
  16. Select Works of Lord Byron
    • Poems by the Right Honourable Lord Byron; with his Memoirs [Hours of Idleness; English Bards and Scotch Reviews, A Satire; Poems on Domestic Circumstances, &c.] (1829)

    17. Frontispiece (vol. II)



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    Jones's Diamond Cabinet Editions of Select British Poets (vol. III)

    Volume III

  17. Moore
    • Hannah More: Sacred Dramas; The Search after Happiness; and Other Poems (1829)
  18. Pope
    • The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. (1829)
  19. Watts
    • Isaac Watts, D.D.: Horæ Lyricæ: Poems Chiefly of the Lyric Kind: in Three Books (1829)
  20. Hayley
    • William Hayley, Esq.: The Triumphs of Temper; A Poem in Six Cantos (1829)
  21. Mason
    • William Mason, M.A.: The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books (1829)
  22. Prior
    • The Poetical Works of Matthew Prior (1829)
  23. Grahame
    • James Grahame: The Sabbath, and Other Poems (1829)
  24. Logan
    • Poems; and Runnamede, A Tragedy, by The Rev. John Logan, F.R.S.E. (1829)

    25. Frontispiece (vol. III)



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    Jones's Diamond Cabinet Editions of Select British Poets (vol. IV)

    Volume IV

  25. Dryden
    • The Poetical Works of John Dryden (1830)
  26. Littleton
    • The Poetical Works of Lord Lyttleton (1830)
  27. Hammond
    • The Poetical Works of James Hammond (1830)
  28. Richardson
    • David Lester Richardson, Esq.: Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems Partly Written in India (1827)
  29. Charlotte Smith
    • Charlotte Smith: Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems (1829)
  30. Canning
    • The Poetical Works of the Right Hon. George Canning (1830)
  31. Gifford
    • Gifford’s Baviad & Mæviad: Pasquin vs. Faulder: Epistle to Peter Pindar: with the Author's Memoir of His Own Life (1829)
  32. Bloomfield’s Farmer’s Boy
    • Robert Bloomfield: The Farmer’s Boy (n.d.)

    33. Frontispiece (vol. IV)

So how does this numbering work? There are 32 separate authors or works included here. If we add to these the fourteen excluded from the 50-volume set above, that comes to 46. But then of course there are the two authors who aren't in the larger set - Byron and Hammond. If we subtract them, we're left with 44. But then Burns, Cowper, Demosthenes, Dryden, Pope and Prior each required two volumes for their respective Works. 44 + 6 = 50.

All in all, good value for money, I'd say!

I don't feel that I can quite leave it at that, though. Who are these writers? Why are so many of their names unfamiliar to us? What does that tell us about the taste of the common reader in this period between the Romantic poets and the great Victorians?

I've therefore tried to provide some information about each of these authors - familiar or unfamiliar - in the section below.


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Diamond Cabinet Editions
of Select British Poets: London: Jones & Co.
(1827-1835)
[16 of the 32 poets were included in Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-81).
I've marked each of these with an asterisk]
  1. * Mark Akenside: The Poetical Works (1831)
  2. Francis Bacon: Essays: Moral, Economical and Political (1832)
  3. James Beattie: The Minstrel; and Other Poems (1821)
  4. Robert Bloomfield: The Farmer’s Boy (1835)
  5. Robert Burns: The Poetical Works (1829)
  6. * Samuel Butler: Hudibras, A Poem (1829)
  7. Lord Byron: Poems; with his Memoirs (1829)
  8. George Canning: The Poetical Works (1830)
  9. * William Collins: The Poetical Works (1831)
  10. Madame Cottin: Elizabeth; or the Exiles of Siberia (1835)
  11. William Cowper: Poems (1832)
  12. George Crabbe: The Village (1833)
  13. Demosthenes: Orations (1831)
  14. W. Dodd: The Beauties of Shakespeare (1833)
  15. * John Dryden: The Poetical Works (1830)
  16. William Falconer: The Shipwreck; A Poem (1831)
  17. * John Gay: Fables and Other Poems (1832)
  18. William Gifford: Baviad & Mæviad: Pasquin vs. Faulder: Epistle to Peter Pindar (1829)
  19. Goethe: The Sorrows of Werter (1834)
  20. Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1833)
  21. Oliver Goldsmith: The Poetical Works (1832)
  22. James Grahame: The Sabbath, and Other Poems (1829)
  23. * Thomas Gray: The Poetical Works (1832)
  24. James Hammond: The Poetical Works (1830)
  25. William Hayley: The Triumphs of Temper; A Poem in Six Cantos (1829)
  26. Samuel Johnson: Rasselas: A Tale (1835)
  27. Henry Kirke White: The Poetical Remains (1831)
  28. John Langhorne: Theodosius and Constantia (1832)
  29. The Rev. John Logan: Poems; and Runnamede, A Tragedy (1829)
  30. * Lord Lyttleton: The Poetical Works (1830)
  31. William Mason: The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books (1829)
  32. * John Milton: The Poetical Works (1835)
  33. Hannah More: Sacred Dramas; The Search after Happiness; and Other Poems (1829)
  34. * Alexander Pope: The Poetical Works (1829)
  35. * Matthew Prior: The Poetical Works (1829)
  36. David Lester Richardson: Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems Partly Written in India (1827)
  37. Saint-Pierre: Paul and Virginia & The Indian Cottage (1832)
  38. * William Shenstone: The Poetical Works (1831)
  39. Charlotte Smith: Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems (1829)
  40. * William Somervile: The Chase, and Other Poems (1831)
  41. Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1833)
  42. * Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (1830)
  43. * James Thomson: The Seasons; A Poem (1831)
  44. Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1828)
  45. * Isaac Watts: Horæ Lyricæ: Poems Chiefly of the Lyric Kind: in Three Books (1829)
  46. * Edward Young: The Complaint, or Night Thoughts (1826)


  1. The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, M.D. (1831)
    2. Mark Akenside (born ... Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland — died ... London) was a poet and physician, best known for his poem The Pleasures of Imagination, an eclectic philosophical essay ... Written in blank verse derived from Milton’s, it was modelled (as its preface states) on the Roman poets Virgil (the Georgics) and Horace (the Epistles). A debt to Virgil is certainly apparent in the way in which Akenside invests an essentially unpoetic subject — the abstractions of philosophic thought — with poetic form, through studied elevation of language and with considerable grace.
    - Britannica: Mark Akenside
    He was the son of a butcher, but talent and hard work raised him high in the world. As far as his work goes, Edmund Gosse described him as "a sort of frozen Keats".

    Dr. Mark Akenside: The Pleasures of Imagination (1744 / 1754)



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    Paul van Somer: Francis Bacon

    (1561-1626)

  2. Francis Bacon: Essays: Moral, Economical and Political (1832)
    3. Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban ... was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I. Bacon argued for the importance of natural philosophy, guided by the scientific method, and his works remained influential throughout the Scientific Revolution.
    - Wikipedia: Francis Bacon
    It's hard to imagine that Bacon has a very wide readership nowadays besides academics specialising in the history of ideas (unless, that is, he really did write Shakespeare ...) His utopian novel New Atlantis, published posthumously in 1626, was quite influential in its time but his Essays remain his most popular work.

    Francis Bacon: Essays (1597 / 1696)



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    Sir Joshua Reynolds: James Beattie

    (1735-1803)

  3. James Beattie: The Minstrel; and Other Poems (1828)
    4. James Beattie ... was a Scottish poet and essayist, whose once-popular poem The Minstrel was one of the earliest works of the Romantic movement.Beattie was a farmer’s son. He graduated from Marischal College, Aberdeen, and became professor of moral philosophy there. At the age of 25, he published Original Poems and Translations (1760), which already showed a Romantic attitude toward nature. With his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism (1770), a vigorous defense of orthodoxy against the rationalism of David Hume, he achieved fame ... The next year he published the first part of The Minstrel, a poem in the Spenserian stanza tracing the development of a poet’s mind under the influence of nature ... Although the setting is artificial and the moralizing tedious, the poem reflects the author’s gentleness and sensitivity to natural beauty ... Success brought little happiness. His wife became insane and his sons, one of whom was a promising poet, died young.
    - Britannica: James Beattie
    He was also strongly anti-slavery, and, in his Elements of Moral Science, "used the case of Dido Belle to argue the mental capacity of black people."

    James Beattie: The Minstrel, or The Pogress of Genius (1771-74)



  4. Robert Bloomfield: The Farmer’s Boy (1800)
    5. Robert Bloomfield ... was a shoemaker-poet who achieved brief fame with poems describing the English countryside. Born in rural Suffolk but thought too frail to work on the land, Bloomfield was sent to London at age 15 to be apprenticed to a shoemaker. His poem The Farmer’s Boy (1800), written in couplets, owed its popularity to its blend of late 18th-century pastoralism with an early Romantic feeling for nature. The works that followed, from Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (1802) to The Banks of Wye (1811), were also successful, though his vogue later passed.
    - Britannica: Robert Bloomfield
    His work has been compared to that of George Crabbe: "also a native of Suffolk. Both wrote much in couplets of iambic pentameters, and both provide descriptions of rural life at its hardest and least inviting. Bloomfield, however, is more cheerful in tone and his verse is denser and more vigorous."

    Robert Bloomfield: The Farmer’s Boy: A Rural Poem (1800)



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    Alexander Nasmyth: Robert Burns

    (1759-1796)

  5. The Poetical Works of Robert Burns; as Collected and Published by Dr. Currie; with Additional Poems (1829)
    6. Robert Burns ... was the national poet of Scotland, who wrote lyrics and songs in Scots and in English. He was also famous for his amours and his rebellion against orthodox religion and morality.
    - Britannica: Robert Burns
    Wherever the Scottish diaspora ended up, there Burns accompanied them. "As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them ... 'Auld Lang Syne' (1788) is often sung at Hogmanay ... and 'Scots Wha Hae' (1793) served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem".

    Dr. Currie, ed.: The Poetical Works of Robert Burns (1800 / 1821)



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    Pieter Borsseler: Samuel Butler

    (1613-1680)

  6. Samuel Butler: Hudibras, A Poem (1829)
    7. Samuel Butler ... was a poet and satirist, famous as the author of Hudibras, the most memorable burlesque poem in the English language and the first English satire to make a notable and successful attack on ideas rather than on personalities. It is directed against the fanaticism, pretentiousness, pedantry, and hypocrisy that Butler saw in militant Puritanism, extremes which he attacked wherever he saw them.
    - Britannica: Samuel Butler
    Samuel Pepys was one of the first people to buy a copy of the first two parts (of an eventual four) when they were published in 1662. While he "acknowledged that the book was the greatest fashion, he could not see why it was found to be so witty". It was indeed widely read, but did not win Butler preferment at Court.

    Samuel Butler: Hudibras (1663-78 / 1764)



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    Richard Westall: Lord Byron

    (1788-1824)

  7. Poems by the Right Honourable Lord Byron; with his Memoirs [Hours of Idleness; English Bards and Scotch Reviews, A Satire; Poems on Domestic Circumstances, &c.] (1829)
    8. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron ... was a British poet. He was one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest British poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics ... also became popular.
    Byron was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Following graduation, he travelled extensively in Europe, living for seven years in Italy, in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa, and then was forced to flee to England after receiving threats of lynching. During his stay in Italy, he would frequently visit his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence to fight the Ottoman Empire, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero. He died leading a campaign in 1824, at the age of 36, from a fever contracted after the first and second sieges of Missolonghi.
    - Wikipedia: Lord Byron
    Typecast as the “'gloomy egoist' of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), he created a new archetype of literature (and, eventually, pop culture): the brooding, rebellious 'Byronic hero.'" Modern readers, however, tend to prefer the "satiric realism of Don Juan (1819–24), which recounts the adventures of the ... fictitious Spanish libertine."



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    Richard Evans: George Canning

    (1770-1827)

  8. The Poetical Works of the Right Hon. George Canning (1830)
    9. George Canning ... was a British Tory statesman. He held various senior cabinet positions under numerous prime ministers, including two important terms as foreign secretary, finally becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for the last 119 days of his life, from April to August 1827.
    - Wikipedia: George Canning
    Canning was wounded in a duel with his political rival Lord Castlereagh in 1809, and was passed over for Prime Minister in favour of Spencer Perceval. The latter was assassinated in the House of Commons in 1812. Castlereagh later committed suicide in a fit of madness in 1822. It was a violent age.
    Canning's literary talents were overshadowed by his fame as a statesman. He continued to write all through his life, however, and many of his poems were set to music. He was also "involved in the founding of the Anti-Jacobin, a newspaper which was published every Monday from 20 November 1797 to 9 July 1798."
    Its purpose was to support the government and condemn revolutionary doctrines through news and poetry, much of it written by Canning.

    George Canning: Poetical Works (1823 / 1825)



  9. The Poetical Works of William Collins (1831)
    10. William Collins ... was a pre-Romantic English poet whose lyrical odes adhered to Neoclassical forms but were Romantic in theme and feeling. Though his literary career was brief and his output slender, he is considered one of the finest English lyric poets of the 18th century.
    - Britannica: William Collins
    His is a sad story: "Failing to obtain a university fellowship, being judged by a military uncle as 'too indolent even for the army', and having rejected the idea of becoming a clergyman, he settled for a literary career." He accordingly moved to London, where he made friends with such luminaries as James Thomson, Dr Johnson, and the actor David Garrick. However:
    Following the failure of his collection of odes in 1747, Collins' discouragement, aggravated by drunkenness, so unsettled his mind that he eventually sank into insanity and by 1754 was confined to McDonald's Madhouse in Chelsea. From there he moved to the care of an elder sister in Chichester, who lived with her clergyman husband within the cathedral precincts. There Collins continued to stay, with periods of lucidity ... On his death in 1759, he was buried in St Andrew-in-the-Oxmarket Church.



  10. Madame Cottin: Elizabeth; or the Exiles of Siberia (1835)
    11. Marie Sophie Ristaud ... was born in March 1770 at Tonneins. She was not yet twenty when she married her first husband, Jean-Paul-Marie Cottin, a banker. She wrote several romantic and historical novels including Elizabeth; or, the Exiles of Siberia (Elisabeth ou les Exilés de Sibérie 1806), a "wildly romantic but irreproachably moral tale", according to Nuttall's Encyclopaedia. She also published Claire d'Albe (1799), Malvina (1801), Amélie de Mansfield (1803), Mathilde (1805), set in the crusades, and a prose-poem, La Prise de Jéricho. Her writing became more important to her after her first husband died when she was in her early twenties. She went to live with a cousin and her three children at Champlan ... but died at the age of 37 in Paris on 25 August 1807.
    You can, if you wish, find an online copy of Elizabeth, or, The Exiles of Siberia at Wikisource. Here's a sample:
    Two or three versts from Saimka, amidst a marshy forest, upon the edge of a circular lake bordered with poplars, lived a family of exiles. This household was composed of three individuals, a man of forty-five, his wife, and their lovely daughter, in the flower of her youth. Enclosed in this desert, this family had no communication with any person, and except a poor Tartar peasant, who waited on them, no human foot was permitted to enter their cabin. No person knew them, or the cause of their punishment, except the governor of Tobolsk ...
    Read on if you dare!

    Madame Cottin: Elizabeth or the Exiles of Siberia (1806 / c.1880s)



    •

    Lemuel Francis Abbott: William Cowper

    (1731-1800)

  11. Poems by William Cowper, Esq. (1832)
    12. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th-century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him "the best modern poet", whilst William Wordsworth particularly admired his poem "Yardley-Oak".
    After being institutionalised for insanity, Cowper found refuge in a fervent evangelical Christianity. He continued to suffer doubt about his salvation and, after a dream in 1773, believed that he was doomed to eternal damnation. He recovered, and went on to write more religious hymns.
    - Wikipedia: William Cowper
    At least some of his travails have been attributed by contemporary scholars to an inability on his part to exhibit the conventional heteronormative attitudes and behaviour of the time:
    Modern literary scholar Conrad Brunstrom described Cowper's relationships with women and men at this time as queer ... "Not only did Cowper refuse a traditional heterosexual role, he also refused many of the attributes attached to those who were supposed to have refused such a role ... making him anti-heteronormative and anti-homonormative at one and the same time." Cowper's 18th century understanding of his own predicament was that — being "what the world calls an old bachelor" — he was nevertheless "a rational creature", much abused by those who would make sport of him ...

    William Cowper: Poems (1782)



    •

    Henry William Pickersgill: George Crabbe

    (1754-1832)

  12. George Crabbe: The Village (1833)
    13. George Crabbe ... was an English writer of poems and verse tales memorable for their realistic details of everyday life.
    Crabbe grew up in the then-impoverished seacoast village of Aldeburgh ... and he was apprenticed to a surgeon at 14. Hating his mean surroundings and unsuccessful occupation, he abandoned both in 1780 and went to London. In 1781 he wrote a desperate letter of appeal to Edmund Burke, who read Crabbe’s writings and persuaded James Dodsley to publish one of his didactic, descriptive poems, The Library (1781). Burke also used his influence to have Crabbe accepted for ordination ...
    In 1783 Crabbe demonstrated his full powers as a poet with The Village. Written in part as a protest against Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), which Crabbe thought too sentimental and idyllic, the poem was his attempt to portray realistically the misery and degradation of rural poverty. Crabbe made good use in The Village of his detailed observation of life in the bleak countryside from which he himself came. The Village was popular but was followed by an unworthy successor, The Newspaper (1785), and after that Crabbe published no poetry for the next 22 years ...
    In 1807 Crabbe began to publish poetry again ... with a new work, The Parish Register, a poem of more than 2,000 lines in which he made use of a register of births, deaths, and marriages to create a compassionate depiction of the life of a rural community. Other works followed, including The Borough (1810), another long poem; Tales in Verse (1812); and Tales of the Hall (1819).
    - Britannica: George Crabbe
    "Though Nature's sternest Painter, yet the best", was Byron's verdict on him in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). Q. D. Leavis said of him: "He is (or ought to be — for who reads him?) a living classic." That's the problem, really. Everyone praises him, but nobody reads him - except of course Benjamin Britten, whose classic opera Peter Grimes (1943-45) was inspired by his work.

    George Crabbe: The Village (1783)



    •

    Demosthenes

    (384–322 BCE)

  13. Demosthenes: The Orations (1831)
    14. [Demosthenes devoted] his most productive years to opposing Macedon's expansion. He idealized his city and strove throughout his life to restore Athens's supremacy and motivate his compatriots against Philip II of Macedon. He sought to preserve his city's freedom and to establish an alliance against Macedon, in an unsuccessful attempt to impede Philip's plans to expand his influence southward, conquering the Greek states.
    After Philip's death, Demosthenes played a leading part in his city's uprising against the new king of Macedonia, Alexander the Great. However, his efforts failed, and the revolt was met with a harsh Macedonian reaction. To prevent a similar revolt against his own rule, Alexander's successor in this region, Antipater, sent his men to track Demosthenes down. Demosthenes killed himself to avoid being arrested ...
    The Alexandrian Canon ... called Demosthenes one of the ten greatest Attic orators and logographers. Longinus likened Demosthenes to a blazing thunderbolt and argued that he had "perfected to the utmost the tone of lofty speech, living passions, copiousness, readiness, speed." Quintilian extolled him as lex orandi ("the standard of oratory"). Cicero said of him that inter omnis unus excellat ("among them all, he excels alone"), and also praised him as "the perfect orator" who lacked nothing.
    - Wikipedia: Demosthenes
    Thomas Leland's translation of The Orations of Demosthenes Pronounced to Excite the Athenians Against Philip, King of Macedon was first published in 1756, and frequently reprinted throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

    Thomas Leland: The Orations of Demosthenes (1756-70 / 1777)



  14. William Dodd: The Beauties of Shakespeare: Regularly Selected From Each Play, with a General Index, Digesting Them Under Proper Heads (1833)
    15. William Dodd ... was an English Anglican clergyman and a man of letters. He lived extravagantly, and was nicknamed the "Macaroni Parson". He dabbled in forgery in an effort to clear his debts, and was caught and convicted. Despite a public campaign for a Royal pardon, in which he received the assistance of Samuel Johnson, he was hanged at Tyburn for forgery ...
    He wrote several published works, including poems, a novel, and theological tracts. His most successful work was The Beauties of Shakespeare (1752), in which he may be said to have invented the "index.". He also wrote a Commentary on the Bible (1765–1770), and composed the blank verse Thoughts in Prison while in Newgate between his conviction and execution.
    Dodd's sermon The Convict's Address to his unhappy Brethren was largely written by Samuel Johnson to be used as Dodd's own. When one of Johnson's friends doubted the authorship, Johnson, in order to protect Dodd, made his famous remark "Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully".
    - Wikipedia: William Dodd
    What can one say? Dodd was certainly a man who liked to live large. Bribery, forgery, running up debts ... it's difficult to avoid the thought that he was perhaps not entirely suited to the profession of clergyman.

    William Dodd: The Beauties of Shakespeare (1752 / 1821)



    •

    Sir Godfrey Kneller: John Dryden

    (1631-1700)

  15. The Poetical Works of John Dryden (1830)
    16. John Dryden ... was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden ...
    ... during the Protectorate, Dryden obtained work with Oliver Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurloe ... At Cromwell's funeral on 23 November 1658 Dryden processed with the Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Soon afterwards he published his first important poem, Heroic Stanzas (1659), a eulogy on Cromwell's death ... In 1660 Dryden celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric. In this work the Interregnum is illustrated as a time of chaos, and Charles is seen as the restorer of peace and order.
    - Wikipedia: John Dryden
    Run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, eh, John? The editors of the bio-note above are of the opinion that his "greatest achievements were in satiric verse", and who am I to dispute them? The set contains not only the two volumes of his collected poems, but also the whole of his translation of Virgil.

    John Dryden, trans.: The Works of Virgil (1697 / 1716)



  16. William Falconer: The Shipwreck; A Poem (1831)
    17. William Falconer was the son of a barber in Edinburgh ... He became a sailor, and thereby competent to describe the management of a storm-tossed vessel, whose career and fate are told in his poem, The Shipwreck (1762), a work of genuine, if unequal talent. The efforts Falconer made to improve the poem in a later edition were not wholly successful.
    ... Falconer was briefly a midshipman on the Royal George, then in 1763 he became purser of the frigate Glory, aboard which he wrote the political satire Demagogue. In 1767 he was purser of the Swiftsure. In 1769 he published An Universal Dictionary of the Marine.
    William Falconer was a passenger in the frigate Aurora when it was lost at sea on a voyage to India. He was last seen on 24 December 1769.
    - Wikipedia: William Falconer
    He'd certainly seem to be a contender for the life-imitating-art award. Not only that, but "Falconer's poems were used by Patrick O'Brian in his Aubrey-Maturin series. One of his lesser characters is a nautical poet, but his poems are Falconer's."

    William Falconer: The Shipwreck (1762 / 1811)



    •

    Godfrey Kneller: John Gay

    (1685-1732)

  17. John Gay: Fables and other Poems (1832)
    18. John Gay ... was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera (1728), a ballad opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names.
    ... He wrote a sequel, Polly, relating the adventures of Polly Peachum in the West Indies; its production was forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain ... This act of "oppression" caused no loss to Gay. It proved an excellent advertisement for Polly, which was published by subscription in 1729, and brought its author several thousand pounds ...
    He was buried in Westminster Abbey. The epitaph on his tomb is by Pope, and is followed by Gay's own mocking couplet:
    Life is a jest, and all things show it,
    I thought so once, but now I know it.
    - Wikipedia: John Gay
    He's probably best remembered today for having inspired the Brecht / Weill Threepenny Opera, famous for its ballad "Mack the Knife".

    John Gay: Fables (1727)



  18. Gifford’s Baviad & Mæviad: Pasquin vs. Faulder: Epistle to Peter Pindar: with the Author's Memoir of His Own Life (1829)
    19. William Gifford ... was an English satirical poet, classical scholar, and early editor of 17th-century English playwrights, best known as the first editor (1809–24) of the Tory Quarterly Review, founded to combat the liberalism of the Whig Edinburgh Review. Gifford owed his editorship to his connection with the statesman George Canning on The Anti-Jacobin (1797–98), a weekly of which he had been editor and in which Canning and other Tories had ridiculed revolutionary principles.
    ... In The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795), verse satires attacking the Della-cruscans, a group of minor English writers of the 1780s who took their name from the Italian Accademia della Crusca (“Crusca Academy”), he shows his resentment of those to whom entry to the world of letters, so difficult for him, had been (he believed) undeservedly easy ... He is chiefly remembered for having published John Wilson Croker’s savage attack on John Keats’s Endymion (1818)..
    - Britannica: William Gifford
    A recent critic has conjectured, from her close study of the manuscript of "a discarded chapter of Jane Austen's Persuasion":
    that much of Austen's polished style is probably the result of editorial tidying by Gifford, who worked for the publisher John Murray.
    There is no direct evidence for this, however, and - given the consistency of Austen's style, early and late - it does seem a bit far-fetched.

    William Gifford: The Baviad & Mæviad (1791-95 / 1800)



  19. [Goethe]: The Sorrows of Werter [Werther] (1834)
    20. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ... was a German polymath who is widely regarded as the most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a wide-ranging influence on literary, political ... and philosophical thought in the Western world from the late 18th century to the present. A poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre-director, and critic, Goethe wrote a wide range of works, including plays, poetry and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour.
    Given that they can't even spell the name of his main character correctly, it seems safe to say that Goethe's literary eminence was not really apparent to the editors of Jones's Diamond Classics. Written "in five and a half weeks ... in January to March 1774", Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Young Werther] "instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works."

    Goethe: The Sorrows of Werter [Werther] (1774 / 1779)



    •

    Sir Joshua Reynolds: Oliver Goldsmith

    (1728-1774)

  20. Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1833)
    21. Oliver Goldsmith, born in Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ireland, was an Anglo-Irish essayist, poet, novelist, dramatist, and eccentric, made famous by such works as the series of essays The Citizen of the World, or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762), the poem The Deserted Village (1770), the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and the play She Stoops to Conquer (1773).
    - Britannica: Oliver Goldsmith
    Dr Johnson famously claimed to have been instrumental in arranging The Vicar of Wakefield's publication:
    I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion: I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return; and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.

  21. The Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B. (1832)
    22. The Deserted Village is a poem by Oliver Goldsmith published in 1770. It is a work of social commentary, and condemns rural depopulation and the pursuit of excessive wealth.
    The poem is written in heroic couplets, and describes the decline of a village and the emigration of many of its residents to America. In the poem, Goldsmith criticises rural depopulation, the moral corruption found in towns, consumerism, enclosure, landscape gardening, avarice, and the pursuit of wealth from international trade. The poem employs, in the words of one critic, "deliberately precise obscurity", and does not reveal the reason why the village has been deserted. The poem was very popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also provoked critical responses, including from other poets such as George Crabbe. References to the poem, and particularly its ominous "Ill fares the land" warning, have appeared in a number of other contexts.
    The Britannica article on him claims that "Goldsmith’s poetry lives by its own special softening and mellowing of the traditional heroic couplet into simple melodies that are quite different in character from the solemn and sweeping lines of 18th-century blank verse ... Goldsmith saw people, human situations, and indeed the human predicament from the comic point of view; he was a realist, something of a satirist, but in his final judgments unfailingly charitable." That seems a good a summary as any.

    Oliver Goldsmith: The Deserted Village (1770)



  22. James Grahame: The Sabbath, and Other Poems (1829)
    23. Rev James Grahame ... was a Scottish poet.
    ... His works include a dramatic poem, Mary Queen of Scots (1801), The Sabbath (1804), The Birds of Scotland (1806), British Georgics (1809), and Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade in a joint volume on the subject with Elizabeth Benger and James Montgomery (1809). His principal work, The Sabbath, a sacred and descriptive poem in blank verse, is characterized by devotional feeling and by happy delineation of Scottish scenery. In the notes to his poems he expresses enlightened views on popular education, the criminal law and other public questions. He was emphatically a friend of humanity — a philanthropist as well as a poet.
    - Wikipedia: James Grahame
    Byron characterised him (with his usual charity) as "Sepulchral Grahame" in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

    James Grahame: The Sabbath and Other Poems (1804 / 1817)



    •

    Thomas Gray

    (1716-1771)

  23. The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray (1832)
    24. Thomas Gray ... was an English poet ... and classical scholar at Cambridge University, being a fellow first of Peterhouse then of Pembroke College. He is widely known for his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", published in 1751. Gray was a self-critical writer who published only 13 poems in his lifetime, despite being very popular. He was offered the position of Poet Laureate in 1757 after the death of Colley Cibber, though he declined.
    - Wikipedia: Thomas Gray
    The Encyclopedia Britannica article on him concludes: "Although his literary output was slight, he was the dominant poetic figure in the mid-18th century and a precursor of the Romantic movement". General James Wolfe allegedly recited Gray's "Elegy" to his officers before his capture of Quebec in 1759, adding, "I would prefer being the author of that Poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow." Perhaps the Fates were listening, as he was killed at the moment of his victory.



  24. The Poetical Works of James Hammond (1830)
    25. James Hammond ... was an English poet and politician ... Hammond was educated at Westminster School; at about the age of 18 Noel Broxholme, his future brother-in-law, introduced him to Lord Chesterfield. He soon became a member of the clique around Frederick, Prince of Wales: Cobham, Lyttelton, and Pitt.
    ... Through the prince's influence, as Duke of Cornwall, Hammond was returned to parliament on 13 May 1741 as member for Truro. Hammond then fell into bad health, and died at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire on 7 June 1742, while on a visit to Lord Cobham.
    ... Hammond wrote elegies, avowed imitations of Tibullus. By popular tradition ... he was in love with Kitty Dashwood, later a bedchamber woman to Queen Charlotte. The volume of poems was entitled Love Elegies by Mr. H——nd. Written in the year 1732. With Preface by the E. of C——d., 1743, in which Chesterfield wrote a tribute. The elegies were included in Samuel Johnson's, Robert Anderson's, and Alexander Chalmers's collections of English poets; and were often republished, for example by Thomas Park in 1805 and George Dyer in 1818.
    - Wikipedia: James Hammond
    The Dictionary of National Biography article on Hammond adds that "Horace Walpole records that ‘he was a man of moderate parts, attempted to speak in the House of Commons and did not succeed,’ but it should be borne in mind that the prince's friends and Sir Robert Walpole's adherents were bitter enemies." Dr. Johnson condemned his elegies as having "neither passion, nature, nor manners," nothing "but frigid pedantry". Thomson's Winter, however, includes "a glowing apostrophe to Hammond".



  25. William Hayley, Esq.: The Triumphs of Temper; A Poem in Six Cantos (1829)
    26. William Hayley ... was an English poet, biographer, and patron of the arts.
    Hayley is best remembered for his friendships with William Blake ... and with ... William Cowper. He was also a patron of less well-known writers, including the poet and novelist Charlotte Smith ...
    Of independent means and good intentions, Hayley in 1800 invited Blake and his wife to live in a cottage on his Felpham estate and engrave and print illustrations for his books. His failure to understand Blake’s visionary genius caused Blake, despite his joy in the Sussex scenery and his gratitude for Hayley’s generosity, to see in him “an enemy of my Spiritual Life while (pretending) to be the Friend of my Corporeal”; and in 1803, realizing that Hayley’s wish to turn him into a tame poet, engraver, and miniature painter would eventually destroy his artistic integrity, he returned to London, immortalizing Hayley in the epigram:
    Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache:
    Do be my Enemy for Friendship’s sake.
    Nevertheless, Blake illustrated Hayley’s Ballads Founded on Anecdotes Relating to Animals (1805). Hayley’s other poetical works include the long didactic poems The Triumphs of Temper (1781) and The Triumphs of Music (1804). Though mocked by fellow poets, these were popular in their time. His Life of William Cowper (1803–04) foreshadows the methods of modern biography; he also wrote lives of Milton (1796) and Romney (1809).
    - Britannica: William Hayley
    Wikipedia records that "So great was Hayley's fame that on Thomas Warton's death in 1790 he was offered the laureateship, which he refused". Posterity has not sustained this high assessment of his work, however.

    William Hayley: The Triumphs of Temper (1781 / 1803)



  26. Samuel Johnson: Rasselas: A Tale (1835)
    27. Samuel Johnson ... was an English writer and polymath who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer ... The work for which he is best known is his 42,733-entry Dictionary of the English Language (1755). For this and other contributions in and to the English language, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has called him "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history".
    Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, he attended Pembroke College, Oxford, until lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher, he moved to London and began writing for The Gentleman's Magazine. Early works include the poem London (1738), the biography Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), the poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and the play Irene (1749) ... Later works included The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) and The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765) ... Near the end of his life, he authored the voluminous and highly influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781), a series of biographies and critical appraisals of 52 poets of the 17th and 18th centuries.
    Although tall and robust, he was deaf in one ear and blind in one eye. For most of his life he made regular and uncontrolled gestures and tics that disconcerted some upon meeting him. Boswell and other biographers documented Johnson's behaviour and mannerisms in such detail that they have informed a posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome, a condition neither defined nor manageable in the 18th century.
    - Wikipedia: Samuel Johnson
    It was long believed of The History of Rasselas that "Johnson wrote the piece in only one week to help pay the costs of his mother's funeral", but this has now been debunked. Contemporary critics claim, instead, that "Johnson wrote Rasselas instead of going to see his mother while she was still alive. It was written in anticipation of her funeral." It's a curious fact that Johnson's rather gloomy parable was published only three months after Voltaire's Candide, a far more comprehensive attack on the smugness of contemporary philosophical sophistry.

    Dr. Samuel Johnson: The Prince of Abissinia. A Tale (1759)



  27. The Poetical Remains of Henry Kirke White of Nottingham, Late of St. John's College, Cambridge (1831)
    28. Henry Kirke White ... was an English poet and hymn-writer. He died at the young age of 21.
    White was born in Nottingham, the son of a butcher, a trade for which he was himself intended. However, he was greatly attracted to book-learning. By age seven, he was giving reading lessons ... to a family servant. After being briefly apprenticed to a stocking-weaver, he was articled to a lawyer, George Coldham. While in this position, he excelled in studying Latin and Greek ...
    Seeing the results of White's diligent studies and his deteriorating health, his master offered to release him from his contract if he had sufficient means to go to college. He ... published in 1803, aged 17, Clifton Grove, a Sketch in Verse, with other Poems ... The book was violently attacked in the Monthly Review (February 1804), but White was rewarded with a kind letter from Robert Southey.
    Through the efforts of his friends, he was able to enter St John's College, Cambridge ... Close application to study induced a serious illness — consumption was the disease ... to which he ultimately became a victim, and to which White made many allusions in his poems and letters.
    Fears were also entertained for his sanity, but he went into residence at Cambridge, with a view to taking holy orders, in the autumn of 1805. The strain of continuous study quickly worsened his already deteriorating health resulting in his death.
    ... Much of his fame was due to sympathy inspired by his early death; but Lord Byron agreed with Southey about the young man's promise ...
    His Remains, with his letters (which along with White's poems contain so many allusions to himself that they may almost be considered an autobiography) and an account of his life, were edited (5 vols., 1807–1822) by Robert Southey
    - Wikipedia: Henry Kirke White
    The following lines from his poem "Clifton Grove" caused great controversy at the time:
    ... where the town’s blue turrets dimly rise,
    And manufacture taints the ambient skies,
    The pale mechanic leaves the lab’ring loom,
    The air-pent hold, the pestilential room,
    And rushes out, impatient to begin
    The stated course of customary sin.



  28. John Langhorne: Theodosius and Constantia (1832)
    29. John Langhorne was an English clergyman, poet, translator, editor and author.
    [His] father was also a clergyman and died when his son was four. His mother made sure he had a school education, first in Winton village and then in Appleby, but there were not sufficient funds to send him to university. From the age of 18, he supported himself by teaching at various places in Yorkshire ... Having taken deacon's orders, he left in 1761 and, after a curate's appointment in Dagenham, became curate and lecturer at St. John's, Clerkenwell in 1764 ...
    Langhorne now began to put his literary talents to use, particularly as a reviewer for the Monthly Review, where his sarcastic style earned him many enemies. He was more generous in the case of William Collins, whose poetry at that period was largely disregarded. Langhorne brought out a first edition of his collected poems in 1765, subsequent re-editions of which eventually helped establish Collins' reputation. Then in 1766 Langhorne brought out his own Poetical Works and that same year became rector of Blagdon.
    Following his wife's death, Langhorne left Blagdon to stay for a while with his elder brother William at Folkestone. There they made their joint translation of Plutarch's Lives (published in 1770) [which] was frequently reprinted.
    - Wikipedia: John Langhorne
    According to one of the (opportunistic) reprints I've managed to find of The Correspondence Of Theodosius And Constantia, it "unveils a poignant exchange of letters between two souls, chronicling their evolving relationship from their initial acquaintance to Theodosius's departure. This epistolary novel, now available for the first time from original manuscripts (sic.), offers a rare glimpse into the hearts and minds of its protagonists during an era of elegance and sentiment." And yet, it must once have been sufficiently well thought of to be included in this collection of "classics."
    Even his friends, it would appear, had to "admit that 'his chief faults are redundant decoration and an affectation of false and unnecessary ornament'. On account of this, his literary and political enemies made of him a new candidate for inclusion in Alexander Pope's Dunciad ... His heavy drinking was also frequently mentioned."

    John Langhorne: Theodosius and Constantia (1763-64)



    •

    Daniel Somerville: Rev. John Logan

    (1748-1788)

  29. Poems; and Runnamede, A Tragedy, by The Rev. John Logan, F.R.S.E. (1829)
    30. Rev John Logan ... was a minister in Leith, Scotland, a popular preacher known also as a historian. Self-destructive behaviour saw him end his life as a hack writer in London.
    ... In 1771 he was presented to South Leith Parish Church for acceptance as their minister. A dispute intervened, not helped by Logan's writing a first and satirical drama, The Planters of the Vineyard. In April 1773 he was ordained and admitted as "second charge" minister of the parish of South Leith.
    ... Logan's connection with the stage gave offence to his parishioners. He was also depressive, and drank. He fathered an illegitimate son by a servant girl, and went off to London in 1781.
    ... In 1783 he had a play "Runnamede" performed on the Edinburgh stage at the Theatre Royal at the east end of Princes Street.
    A second pregnant parishioner in 1785 proved the last straw. Logan resigned his charge, 27 December 1786, on being allowed an annuity from the living.
    The rest of Logan's life was spent in London, where he occupied himself with writing. Through Samuel Charters and Adam Smith he became editor of the English Review ... There in 1787 he punctured the "Ayrshire ploughman" image of Robert Burns by pointing out that he was a tenant farmer.
    Logan died in London on 25 December 1788 and was buried on 28 December. His grave location is not known.
    - Wikipedia: John Logan
    He sounds like a real treat, doesn't he? Repeated accusations of plagiarism have not really helped his cause, either. As for his tragedy Runnamede, the one included in this set:
    It reflected contemporary politics in its emphasis on the liberties of the subject. It made out a clear parallel between John of England and King George III of Great Britain, and for that reason the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain had prevented its production on the London stage.
    However, Sir Walter Scott acknowledged that it influenced his novel Ivanhoe.

    Rev. John Logan: Poems (1781)



  30. The Poetical Works of Lord Lyttelton (1830)
    31. George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton ... was a British Whig statesman and writer ...
    Acquainted with the leading literary figures of his day, Lyttelton wrote a poetic epistle to Alexander Pope and a description of James Thomson included in the poet’s The Castle of Indolence (1748). He helped obtain a pension for Thomson and provided support to Henry Fielding. Fielding dedicated his novel Tom Jones (1749) to him, and Tobias Smollett satirized him as Gosling Scragg in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751). John Lord Harvey rather maliciously accused Lyttelton of having “a great flow of words that were always uttered in lulling monotony.” Lyttelton himself composed, among other works, Dialogues of the Dead (1760), in imitation of the Greek satirist Lucian.
    - Britannica: George Lyttelton
    He seems to have had little success as a politician, but "Lyttelton's own poetic reputation was guaranteed continuity by his work being included in the collection of English poets prefaced by Johnson's Lives":
    Though Samuel Johnson's biographical notice of Lyttelton is characterised by a conspicuous show of dislike, it diverges at the end into a long description of his exemplary death and the plain inscription he asked to have added to his first wife's monument in St John the Baptist Church, Hagley.



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    William Mason

    (1724-1797)

  31. William Mason, M.A.: The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books (1829)
    32. William Mason ... was an English poet, divine, amateur draughtsman, author, editor and gardener.
    He was born in Hull and educated at Hull Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge. He was ordained in 1754 and held a number of posts in the church.
    In 1747, his poem "Musaeus, a Monody on the Death of Mr. Pope" was published to acclaim and quickly went through several editions. Summarizing this poem, a threnody, William Lyon Phelps writes:
    Musaeus was a monody on the death of Pope, and written in imitation of Milton's Lycidas. Different poets in Musaeus bewail Pope's death; Chaucer speaks in an imitation of old English, and Spenser speaks two stanzas after the metre of the Shepherd's Calendar and three stanzas in the style of the Fairy Queen. There is nothing remarkable about these imitations ...
    Among his other works are the historical tragedies Elfrida (1752) and Caractacus (1759) ... and a long poem on gardening, The English Garden (three volumes, 1772–82).
    - Wikipedia: William Mason
    He was also "the friend, executor, and biographer of Thomas Gray". He was asked to be Poet Laureate by Pitt the Younger in 1785, but declined the honour (if honour it truly was).

    William Mason: The English Garden (1783)



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    John Milton

    (1608-1674)

  32. The Poetical Works of John Milton: Complete in One Volume (1835)
    33. John Milton ... was an English poet, pamphleteer, and historian, considered the most significant English author after William Shakespeare.
    Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest epic poem in English. Together with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, it confirms Milton’s reputation as one of the greatest English poets. In his prose works Milton advocated the abolition of the Church of England and the execution of Charles I. From the beginning of the English Civil Wars in 1642 to long after the restoration of Charles II as king in 1660, he espoused in all his works a political philosophy that opposed tyranny and state-sanctioned religion. His influence extended not only through the civil wars and interregnum but also to the American and French revolutions. In his works on theology, he valued liberty of conscience, the paramount importance of Scripture as a guide in matters of faith, and religious toleration toward dissidents. As a civil servant, Milton became the voice of the English Commonwealth after 1649 through his handling of its international correspondence and his defense of the government against polemical attacks from abroad.
    - Britannica: John Milton
    Dr. Johnson praised him for having the power of "displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy and aggravating the dreadful". Robert Graves's 1943 novel The Story of Marie Powell: Wife to Mr. Milton - narrated by his first wife, a Catholic and Royalist supporter during the Civil War - depicts Milton as a humorless prig, a domestic tyrant, and a hair-fetishist (or trichophilist). Whether or not this is entirely fair, no less a critic than E. M. Forster proclaimed the result "a thumping good read."

    Rev. Henry John Todd, ed.: The Poetical Works of John Milton (1801)



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    Hannah More

    (1745-1833)

  33. Hannah More: Sacred Dramas; The Search after Happiness; and Other Poems (1829)
    34. Hannah More ... was an English religious writer, philanthropist, poet, and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, who wrote on moral and religious subjects.
    Born in Bristol, she taught at a school her father founded there and began writing plays. She became involved in the London literary elite ... Her later plays and poetry became more evangelical. She joined the Clapham Sect, a group opposing the slave trade. In the 1790s, she wrote Cheap Repository Tracts on moral, religious and political topics, to distribute to the literate poor (as a retort to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man). Meanwhile, she broadened her links with schools she and her sister Martha had founded in rural Somerset. These curbed their teaching of the poor, allowing limited reading but no writing. More was noted for her political conservatism, being described as an anti-feminist, a counter-revolutionary, or a conservative feminist.
    - Wikipedia: Hannah More
    Dr. Johnson has been quoted as scolding her: "Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth having." However, he would later [call] her "the finest versifatrix in the English language". She was a prominent member of the 18th-century Blue Stockings Society:
    led by the hostess and critic Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), the "Queen of the Blues" ... In the following generation came Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741–1821), Hannah More (1745–1833) and Frances Burney (1752–1840).

    Hannah More: Sacred Dramas (1786-87)



  34. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. (1829)
    35. Alexander Pope ... was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, Pope is best known for his satirical and discursive poetry including An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–1717), The Dunciad (1728–1743), and for his translations of Homer.
    Pope is often quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, some of his verses having entered common parlance (e.g. "damning with faint praise" or "to err is human; to forgive, divine").
    ... Pope's education was affected by the recently enacted Test Acts, a series of English penal laws that upheld the status of the established Church of England, banning Catholics from teaching, attending a university, voting, and holding public office on penalty of perpetual imprisonment.
    - Wikipedia: Alexander Pope
    His refusal to abandon his Catholic faith, along with his ill health, effectively barred Pope from most conventional avenues of advancement. He was forced to make a reputation for himself by less direct means: the marketing of his translation of Homer being an excellent example of how to hold out for the best bargain possible. His reputation, in eclipse during the Romantic era, is now (perhaps) higher than it ever was.

    Dr. Warburton, ed.: The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope (1812)



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    Thomas Hudson: Matthew Prior

    (1664-1721)

  35. The Poetical Works of Matthew Prior (1829)
    36. Matthew Prior ... was an English poet, statesman, and diplomat, who played a crucial role in securing the Treaties of Utrecht, serving as Minister Plenipotentiary to France from 1712 to 1715. He is also known as a contributor to The Examiner.
    ... When Queen Anne died and the Whigs regained power, Prior was impeached by Robert Walpole and kept in close custody from 1715 to 1717. By this time he had already published a collection of verse, written in 1709.
    During his imprisonment, he wrote his longest humorous poem, Alma; or, The Progress of the Mind. It was published by subscription in 1718, along with Poems on Several Occasions. The sum received for this volume (4000 guineas), with a present of £4000 from Lord Harley, enabled him to live in some comfort.
    Prior died in 1721 at Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, and was buried in Westminster Abbey ... Thackeray claimed Prior’s works to be “amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.”
    - Wikipedia: Matthew Prior
    His own assessment of his literary prowess was a little more modest: "he had commonly business enough upon his hands, and was only a poet by accident."



  36. David Lester Richardson, Esq.: Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems Partly Written in India (1827)
    37. David Lester Richardson ... was an officer of the East India Company, who throughout his life followed literary pursuits as a poet and periodical writer, and as editor and proprietor of literary journals. A skilled linguist, he was in later life an educator, serving as professor of English at Hindu College ...
    In 1822, he published a slim volume of poems under his full name - a work he was later ashamed of, presumably for its callow elements. He was granted medical leave to visit England in 1824; this first return trip to the mother-country lasted until 1829. In London he pursued his literary muse, publishing Sonnets and Other Poems in 1825, apparently to warm reviews. It was reprinted a number of times and a third edition was published in 1827 within the Jones Diamond Edition series of British Poets; Richardson was the only living poet to have his work included in the series.
    More detailed biographical information can be found at the following link: Calcutta Monthly Journal and General Register: Biographical Sketches, 1 - D. L. R.. For a more modern view, you might be better off consulting Raha Rafii's fascinating 2023 essay "Folly":
    Richardson was certainly deserving of the mild praise from the journals that were blurbed at the end of his collection. ‘A volume of miscellaneous poems, many of which possess much beauty’, wrote The Star in typical English restraint.
    Along with the requisite love and memorial poems, for every idyllic reference to England — with the distinct exception of London, where ‘morning wakes, and through the misty air in sickly radiance struggles’ — Richardson included somber reflections on various parts of India. Always in juxtaposition to the verdant, life-giving hills of southwest England, they were places that were marked by their misery and desertion — with endnotes (!) to let the English reader know precisely how awful they were. Despite waxing poetic about the morning and evening light in the various sonnets written ‘in India’, Richardson had less gracious opinions of the places and peoples upon which it fell.

    David Lester Richardson: Sonnets and Other Poems (1827)



  37. Saint-Pierre: Paul and Virginia & The Indian Cottage (1832)
    38. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre ... was a French writer and botanist. He is best known for his 1788 novel, Paul et Virginie, a very popular 18th-century classic of French literature.
    At the age of twelve he ... went with his uncle, a skipper, to the West-Indies. After returning from this trip he was educated as an engineer at the École des Ponts. Then he joined the French Army and was involved in the Seven Years' War against Prussia and England, but was dismissed for insubordination. After travels around Europe he returned to Paris in 1765.
    He received a small inheritance on his father's death, and in 1768 he traveled to Mauritius where he served as engineer and studied plants. On his return in 1771 he became friendly with and a pupil of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
    His Voyage à l'Île de France (2 vols., 1773) gained him a reputation as a champion of innocence and religion, and in consequence, through the exertions of the bishop of Aix, a pension of 1000 livres a year. The Études de la nature (3 vols., 1784) was an attempt to prove the existence of God from the wonders of nature; he set up a philosophy of sentiment to oppose the materializing tendencies of the Encyclopaedists. His masterpiece, Paul et Virginie, appeared in 1789 in a supplementary volume of the Études, and his second great success, less sentimental and showing some humour, the Chaumière indienne, not until 1790.
    Saint-Pierre was an avid advocate and practitioner of vegetarianism, and although he was a devout Christian was also heavily influenced by Enlightenment-era intellectuals like Voltaire and his mentor Rousseau.
    I suppose one shouldn't laugh at such things, but the scene in Paul et Virginie where the virtuous heroine prefers drowning in a shipwreck to removing her shift in order to swim to shore does strike me as an odd trait to celebrate. Still, she preserves her modesty to the end - silly girl!

    Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: Paul et Virginie (1788)



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    Edward Alcock: William Shenstone

    (1714-1763)

  38. The Poetical Works of William Shenstone (1831)
    39. William Shenstone ... was a representative 18th-century English “man of taste.” As a poet, amateur landscape gardener, and collector, he influenced the trend away from Neoclassical formality in the direction of greater naturalness and simplicity.
    From 1745, in response to the current vogue for the ferme ornée (“ornamental farm”; i.e., one that was as picturesque as it was profitable), he devoted his chief energies to beautifying his estate, the Leasowes, by “landscape gardening,” a term he was the first to use. His theories, outlined in “Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening” (1764), involved the creation of winding waterways and walks and a series of picturesque views.
    In his poetry Shenstone celebrated rustic virtue and simplicity, foreshadowing the sentiments of the early Romantics. His best-known poem, The School-Mistress (1742), commemorates, in Spenserian stanzas, his first teacher at the village school—Sarah Lloyd. He published miscellaneous odes, elegies, and types of light verse, an index of the poetic fashions of the times. He was influential in reviving the ballad and advised and assisted Bishop Percy in the compilation and editing of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), the book that conferred literary status on the ballad.
    - Britannica: William Shenstone
    Robert Burns referred to him as "... that celebrated poet whose divine elegies do honour to our language, our nation and our species" - and you can't say better than that!

    William Shenstone: The Poetical Works (1771)



  39. Charlotte Smith: Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems (1829)
    40. Charlotte Smith ... was an English novelist and poet, highly praised by the novelist Sir Walter Scott. Her poetic attitude toward nature was reminiscent of William Cowper’s in celebrating the “ordinary” pleasures of the English countryside. Her radical attitudes toward conventional morality ... and political ideas of class equality (inspired by the French Revolution) gained her notoriety, but her work belongs essentially with that of the derivative 18th-century romantic tradition of women novelists.
    Smith’s husband fled to France to escape his creditors. She joined him there, until, thanks largely to her, he was able to return to England. In 1787, however, she left him and began writing to support her 12 children. Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays, which she had published in 1784, had been well received, but because novels promised greater financial rewards, she wrote, after some free translations of French novels, Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake (1789). Desmond appeared in 1792 and was followed by her best work, The Old Manor-House (1793). Toward the end of her life, she turned to writing instructive books for children, the best being Conversations Introducing Poetry for the Use of Children (1804).
    - Britannica: Charlotte Smith
    Wikipedia adds the following details about her final years:
    Waning interest left her destitute by 1803. Barely able to hold a pen, she sold her book collection to pay debts and died in 1806. Her poem Beachy Head (1807) [a meditation on "the modern corruption caused by commerce and nationalism"] was published posthumously. Largely forgotten by the mid-19th century, she has since been seen as a major Romantic precursor.

    Charlotte Smith: Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays (1784)



  40. William Somervile: The Chase, and Other Poems (1831)
    41. William Somerville [aka "Somervile"] ... was a British writer who, after studies directed toward a career at law, lived the life of a country gentleman, indulging in the field sports that were to make up the subject matter of his best-known poems, especially The Chace (1735). That poem, written in Miltonic blank verse, traces the history of hunting up to the Norman Conquest of England (1066) and gives incidental information on kennel design, hare hunting, stag hunting, otter hunting, the breeding and training of dogs, and dog diseases and bites. Among the many digressions is one on Oriental hunting.
    - Britannica: William Somerville
    Wikipedia supplements this summary with the following details:
    Somervile's convivial hospitality strained his small personal income and plunged him into debt. Eventually he took to drinking heavily and died on 17 July 1742 at the age of 66.

    William Somervile: The Chase: A Poem (1786)



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    Sir Joshua Reynolds: Laurence Sterne

    (1713-1768)

  41. Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1833)
    42. Laurence Sterne ... was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric. He is best known for his comic novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768).
    Sterne grew up in a military family, travelling mainly in Ireland but briefly in England. He attended Jesus College, Cambridge ... gaining bachelor's and master's degrees, and was ordained as a priest in 1738 ... He briefly wrote political propaganda for the Whigs, but abandoned politics in 1742. In 1759, he wrote an ecclesiastical satire A Political Romance, which embarrassed the church and was burned. Having discovered his talent for comedy, at age 46 he dedicated himself to humour writing as a vocation. Also in 1759, he published the first volume of Tristram Shandy, which was an enormous success and continued for a total of nine volumes. He was a literary celebrity for the rest of his life. In addition to his novels, he published several volumes of sermons. Sterne died in 1768 and was buried in the yard of St George's, Hanover Square.
    - Wikipedia: Laurence Sterne
    Dr. Johnson famously remarked: "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last". However:
    This is strikingly different from the views of continental European critics of the day, who praised Sterne and Tristram Shandy ... Voltaire called it "clearly superior to Rabelais", and ... Goethe praised Sterne as "the most beautiful spirit that ever lived".

    Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1768)



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    Charles Jervas: Jonathan Swift

    (1667-1745)

  42. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (1830)
    43. Jonathan Swift ... was an Anglo-Irish writer, essayist, satirist, and Anglican cleric. He was the author of the satirical prose novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) ... He is regarded by many as the greatest satirist of the Georgian era and one of the foremost prose authors in the history of English and world literature.
    Swift also authored works such as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708). He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—including Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier — or anonymously ... In 1713, he was appointed the dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, and was given the sobriquet "Dean Swift". His trademark deadpan and ironic style of writing, particularly in later works such as A Modest Proposal (1729), has led to such satire being subsequently termed as "Swiftian" ...
    - Wikipedia: Jonathan Swift
    In his Story of Civilization, American polymath Will Durant describes the final years of Swift's life as exhibiting:
    Definite symptoms of madness ... [first appearing] in 1738. In 1741, guardians were appointed to take care of his affairs and watch lest in his outbursts of violence, he should do himself harm. In 1742, he suffered great pain from the inflammation of his left eye, which swelled to the size of ... [a chicken's] egg; five attendants had to restrain him from tearing out his eye. He went a whole year without uttering a word.
    In the end, he fulfilled his own prophecy: "I shall be like that tree. I shall die at the top."

    Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (1726)



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    Stephen Slaughter: James Thomson (1736)

    (1700-1748)

  43. James Thomson: The Seasons; A Poem (1831)
    44. James Thomson ... was a Scottish poet whose best verse foreshadowed some of the attitudes of the Romantic movement. His poetry also gave expression to the achievements of Newtonian science and to an England reaching toward great political power based on commercial and maritime expansion.
    Educated at Jedburgh Grammar School and the University of Edinburgh, Thomson went to London in 1725. While earning his living there as a tutor, he published his masterpiece, a long, blank verse poem in four parts, called The Seasons: Winter in 1726, Summer in 1727, Spring in 1728, and the whole poem, including Autumn, in 1730.
    The Seasons was the first sustained nature poem in English and concludes with a “Hymn to Nature” ... What was most striking to Thomson’s earliest readers was his audacity in unifying his poem without a “plot” or other narrative device, thereby defying the Aristotelian criteria revered by the Neoclassicist critics.
    [He is also] remembered as the author of the famous ode “Rule, Britannia,” from Alfred, a Masque (1740, with music by T.A. Arne); for his ambitious poem in five parts, Liberty (1735–36); and for The Castle of Indolence (1748), an allegory in Spenserian stanzas of what may occur when Indolence overcomes Industry.
    - Britannica: James Thomson
    It's alleged that the poet's father, Thomas Thomson, "was killed while performing an exorcism." Whether or not this was the reason, James decided against following him into the ministry, but instead headed for London to try to publish his verse.

    James Thomson: The Seasons (1730 / 1805)



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    John Giles Eccardt: Horace Walpole (1755)

    (1717-1797)

  44. Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1828)
    45. Horace Walpole ... was an English writer, connoisseur, and collector known for his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first Gothic novel in the English language and one of the earliest literary horror stories. He was perhaps the most assiduous letter writer of his era, and he built Strawberry Hill, a Gothic Revival mansion.
    - Britannica: Horace Walpole
    Anyone who reads The Castle of Otranto nowadays expecting excitement is in for a disappointment - but its influence on subsequent writers in the Gothic vein was immense. Walpole claimed that he was inspired to write the story after a nightmare in which he saw a ghost, as well as a "gigantic hand in armour".

    Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764 / 1765)



    •

    Isaac Watts

    (1674-1748)

  45. Isaac Watts, D.D.: Horæ Lyricæ: Poems Chiefly of the Lyric Kind: in Three Books (1829)
    46. Isaac Watts ... was an English Congregational minister, hymn writer, theologian, and logician. He was a prolific and popular hymn writer and is credited with some 750 hymns. His works include "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross", "Joy to the World", and "O God, Our Help in Ages Past". He is recognised as the "Godfather of English Hymnody"; many of his hymns remain in use today and have been translated into numerous languages.
    - Wikipedia: Isaac Watts
    It's unfortunately true that his greatest claim to fame today is probably the fact that two of his more sententious verses inspired parodies in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The first is "Against Idleness and Mischief", which gave rise to the poem "How Doth the Little Crocodile". The second is "The Sluggard" ("'Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain, / 'You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again'") which suggested "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster".

    Isaac Watts: Horæ Lyricæ (1706 / 1762)



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    Joseph Highmore: Edward Young

    (1683-1765)

  46. Edward Young: The Complaint, or Night Thoughts (1826)
    47. Edward Young ... was an English poet, best remembered for Night-Thoughts, a series of philosophical writings in blank verse, reflecting his state of mind following several bereavements. It was one of the most popular poems of the century, influencing Goethe and Edmund Burke, among many others, and at the end of the century was illustrated by William Blake.
    - Wikipedia: Edward Young
    I suppose one shouldn't judge people on the basis of their personal appearance, but if the portrait above is anything to go by, it's pretty easy to believe the accusation that after taking holy orders, he "wrote many fawning letters in search of preferment, attracting accusations of insincerity."


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Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, & William Wallis: The Temple of the Muses, Finsbury Square (1828)
The office of the publishers, Jones & Co. The building carries four signs: Temple of the Muses / University Edition of British Classic Authors / Metropolitan Improvements / Jones and Compy. The print is dedicated: "To Henry Brougham, Esq., M.P., from whose suggestion the series of "Jones' University Edition of British Classic Authors" was commenced".
Jones & Co. were certainly never weary of packaging and repackaging their wares in increasingly grandiose editions, witness the following advertisement from vol. III of my four-volume set:


Advertisement (vol. III)


What's more, Jones's four-volume "Cabinet Edition of the British Poets" was reprinted - with substantially the same set of contents - by a variety of publishers, including Henry G. Bohn of Bohn's Libraries (1846-64), followed by his successors Bell & Daldy, as late as 1871.


Cabinet Edition of the British Poets. 4 vols (1871)
Photograph: Mark Fryer / Auckland Central Library Special Collections




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