Edmund Spenser (1552 99) has been described as one of the greatest English poets, and is best known for The Faerie Queene, which he composed in celebration of the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. Published in the first series of English Men of Letters in 1879, this biography by R. W. Church (1815 90), Dean of St Paul's, recounts Spenser's life and work, hailing him as a genius who continued the Chaucerian tradition of reflecting the deepest human passions through verse. Beginning with an account of his early life and his time as a Cambridge scholar, Church moves on to explore Spenser's career...

This 1879 biography of poet and author Robert Southey (1774 1843), friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and Poet Laureate, provided a fresh and concise account of his literary endeavours and personal experiences. Written by Edward Dowden (1843 1913), an author and poet of the subsequent generation, and published in the first series of English Men of Letters, the work charts Southey's life, education, travels and literary activities, as well as his changing political views from the Jacobinism of his youth to the relatively conservative outlook of his later years. The book is notable for the...

This life of John Milton was first published in the English Men of Letters series in 1879. Its author, Mark Pattison (1813 84) spent most of his adult life in Oxford, as a student, a tutor, and eventually, from 1861, Rector of Lincoln College. Pattison's scholarly interest in religious thought in England, and in the history of classical learning after the Renaissance, made him the ideal biographer for the poet whose writing life was spent in justifying God's ways to man, and whose knowledge of Greek and Latin literature was almost unmatched. Pattison sees the life as divided into three...

Combining intellectual enthusiasm with analytical bite, David Masson's biography of the self-confessed opium eater provides readers with valuable insights into an author whose life oscillated between respectability, vagrancy and infamy. Published in the first series of English Men of Letters in 1881, only two decades after the death of Thomas de Quincey (1785 1859), and written by a man who, like his subject in his more prosperous years, was a journalist and editor in the heart of literary London, Masson's account describes a man and a nation at the peak of their cultural influence. Covering...