The defense of poesy / Sir Philip Sidney -- On Shakespeare / Ben Jonson -- On Bacon / Ben Jonson -- Of agriculture / Abraham Cowley -- The vision of Mirza / Joseph Addison -- Westminster Abbey / Joseph Addison -- The spectator club / Sir Richard Steele -- Hints towards an essay on conversation / Jonathan Swift -- A treatise on good manners and good breeding / Jonathan Swift -- A letter of advice to a young poet - Jonathan Swift -- On the death of Esther Johnson (Stella) / Jonathan Swift -- The shortest-way with the dissenters / Daniel Defoe -- The education of women / Daniel Defoe -- Life of Addison, 1672-1719 / Samuel Johnson -- Of the standard of taste / David Hume -- Fallacies of anti-reformers / Sydney Smith -- On poesy or art / Samuel Taylor coleridge -- Of persons one would wish to have seen / William Hazlitt --- Deaths of little children / Leigh Hunt -- On the realities of imagination / Leigh Hunt -- On the tragedies of Shakespere / Charles Lamb -- Levana and our ladies of sorrow / Thomas De Quincey -- A defence of poetry / Percy Bysshe Shelley -- Machiavelli / Thomas Babington Macaulay.