Sir Sidney Colvin (1845 1927) was the obvious choice to write a book on John Keats (1795 1821) for the first series of English Men of Letters. At various times Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, Colvin had a long-standing interest in the poet, publishing an edition of his letters to family and friends in 1891, and later writing a longer biography, published in 1917. This introduction to the poet, which used print and manuscript sources not available to earlier biographers, was first published...

Lawrence Sterne (1713 69) was an Anglican clergyman best remembered as the author of the satirical and highly influential novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. After his ordination in 1738, Sterne led the life of a country vicar in Yorkshire, publishing a few satirical works before his masterpiece, which emerged in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767. The first two volumes were an immediate success, bringing him wealth, fame, and a place at the heart of contemporary English literary society. This work, published in the first series of English Men of Letters in 1882 by the...

This biography of William Cowper by Goldwin Smith (1823 1910) was published in the first series of 'English Men of Letters' in 1880 (this reissue being from the 'ninth thousand' of 1881). Smith states in his opening chapter that Cowper (1731 1800) 'is the most important English poet of the period between Pope and the illustrious group headed by Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley he may perhaps himself be numbered among the precursors of the Revolution, though he was certainly the mildest of them all'. He also regards Cowper as the great poet of the religious revival of the eighteenth century....

John Bunyan (1628 88), the Bedfordshire tinker and non-conformist preacher, is best known for writing The Pilgrim's Progress. Published in 1880 in the first series of English Men of Letters, this revealing biography by J. A. Froude (1818 94), historian and friend and biographer of Thomas Carlyle, traces Bunyan's life from his troubled childhood to his early spiritual experiences, his career as a dissenting minister and his imprisonment (during which he contemplated and wrote many of his works) for preaching unlawfully. Setting The Pilgrim's Progress within the context of Bunyan's life, Froude...