PART I

“THESE THREE HUNDRED YEARS”

THE FIRST PERIOD

1596 Francis Meres 35 1598 Richard Barnfield 36 1599 John Weever 37 1610 John Davies 38 1614 Thomas Freeman 39 1622 William Basse 40 1623 Anonymous 41 1623 Ben Jonson 42 1623 Hugh Holland 45 1623 John Heminge and Henrie Condell 46 1623 Leonard Digges 47 1627 Michael Drayton 48 1630 John Milton 49 1632 I. M. S. 50 _a._ 1633 John Hales 53 1637 Sir William D’Avenant 54 _c._ 1637 Anonymous 55 1639 Thomas Bancroft 57 1647 George Daniel 58 1651 Samuel Sheppard 59 _c._ 1661 Thomas Fuller 61 1662-7 Samuel Pepys 62 1664 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 64 1667 John Dryden 66 1668 John Dryden 67 1672 Anonymous 69 1675 Edward Phillips 71 1680 Thomas Otway 72 1681 “A Person of Honour” 74 1693 Sir Charles Sedley 75

THE SECOND PERIOD

1709 Sir Richard Steele 76 1709 Nicholas Rowe 78 1711 Elijah Fenton 80 1712 John Dennis 82 1712 Edward Young 83 1714 Joseph Addison 84 1725 Alexander Pope 85 1727 James Thomson 88 1733 Lewis Theobald 89 1740 Joseph Warton 91 1743 William Collins 92 1744 Sir Thomas Hanmer 93 1747 Samuel Johnson 94 1747 Bishop William Warburton 95 1751 Christopher Smart 96 1754 David Hume 97 1756 Horace Walpole 99 1758 John Armstrong 100 1759 William Mason 101 1759 Thomas Gray 102 1759 David Mallet 103 1759 Edward Young 104 _c._ 1760 Mark Akenside 105 1760 Robert Lloyd 106 1760 Edward Capell 107 1761 Charles Churchill 108 1762 William Whitehead 109 1763 William Thompson 110 1765 Samuel Johnson 111 1768 George Keate 112 1769 David Garrick 113 1769 Anonymous 116 1774 William Richardson 117 1775 William Julius Mickle 119 1777 William Hayley 120 1777 Thomas Warton 121 _a._ 1782 Anna Seward 123 1794 William Lisle Bowles 124

THE THIRD PERIOD

1802 William Wordsworth 127 1804 Felicia Dorothea Hemans 128 1814 Sir Walter Scott 129 1817 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 130 1817 Francis, Lord Jeffrey 133 1818 William Hazlitt 135 _c._ 1818 John Keats 138 _c._ 1818 John Keats 138 1819 John Wilson 140 1824 Charles Sprague 142 1824 Charles Lamb 144 1827 Julius Charles Hare 145 1831 James Hogg 146 1833 Charles Lamb 148 1833 Hartley Coleridge 149 1838 Thomas de Quincey 150 1839 John Sterling 153 1839 Henry Hallam 155 1840 —— Johnstone 156 1840 Thomas Carlyle 157 1841 William Wordsworth 159 1843 Lord Macaulay 160 1844 Ralph Waldo Emerson 162 1850 Frederick William Robertson 164 1851 Leigh Hunt 166 1852 James Anthony Froude 167 1853 David Masson 168 1853 Matthew Arnold 169 1853 Walter Savage Landor 170 1858 John Henry Newman 171 _c._ 1858 James Russell Lowell 173 1863 Nathaniel Hawthorne 175 1864 Bishop Charles Wordsworth 176 1864 Oliver Wendell Holmes 177 1865 Cardinal Wiseman 179 1865 Archbishop Trench 180 1865 Francis Turner Palgrave 181 1866 Frances Anne Kemble 183 1868 John Ruskin 184 1871 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 185 1872 Bayard Taylor 186 1874 William Minto 189 1875 Edward Dowden 190 1877 George Meredith 191 1877 Frederick James Furnivall 192 1878 Walter Horatio Pater 193 1879 Matthew Arnold 195 ? _c._ 1880 Anonymous 197 1880 Algernon Charles Swinburne 199 1882 Algernon Charles Swinburne 201 1883 George Meredith 202 1884 Robert Browning 204 1886 William Wetmore Story 205 1886 Thomas Spencer Baynes 207 1888 Gerald Massey 209 1890 Walt Whitman 210 1891 Richard Watson Gilder 212 _c._ 1894 Mathilde Blind 213 _a._ 1892 Alfred, Lord Tennyson 214 1899 Sidney Lee 215