INTRODUCTION. THE need of tolerably full Annals of English Literature is frequently felt by lecturers and by private students. They often require a colourless outline within which details may be placed, and which may serve to bring into prominence the chronological relations of the facts they deal with. No work hitherto published can be said to occupy, with regard to our literary history, the same position which an ordinary date book does with regard to our political history. The present volume aims at supplying this want. It is divided into two parts. Part I. brings the Annals of English Literature into connection with general European literature and with history, so that a glance enables us to see the position that a given work occupies in the line of development. We can thus obtain a conspectus of the chief literary work that was being done at any given date, and trace the growth of schools and movements. In fact it is hoped that Part I. will perform in some degree the same kind of service for the student of literary history as a map does for the student of geography. From the beginning of the sixteenth century each opening presents six columns. The first gives the dates. The second contains the names of the principal English works published in each year. While only first editions are as a rule mentioned, republication is noticed, where a change of title or other cause is liable to lead to confusion. The names in this column embrace all such as are to be found noticed in ordinary manuals of literary history. Important works included in the same volume are mentioned separately, though in most cases some indication is given of the fact that they appeared together. The third column gives biographical dates, i.e. births and deaths, of the chief English authors. The fourth is devoted to foreign literature. Under this head American names have been with considerable reluctance included, but to have placed them with the English would have suggested a misleading conception as to the true relation of the two literatures, and would have unduly extended the scope of the work. The fifth column contains important historical dates; events not belonging to English history are printed in italics. The sixth column contains annotations, and may be found useful for MS. remarks and references. Before the year 1500 there is a separate division for works usually classed as English Literature, but not written in the English language.* Some of the names in this column are more usually connected with French literature. But, as it has been well said, "We are too apt to forget that London in the latter half of the twelfth century was the capital and centre of the French-speaking world. The Angevin Empire during those years included Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, Aquitaine, and Gascony, and the poets and literary men of that vast tract of country looked to London for recognition and reward. Nearly two-thirds of the French writers of that period are connected with the court of Eng *This arrangement has necessitated the amalgamation of the biographical and historical columns in the first part of the volume up to p. 27. land." Indeed, Mr. Jacobs, from whom these sentences are quoted, goes so far as to assert that "England in the latter half of the twelfth century was the nidus of the whole Romantic movement which characterizes medieval literature." * Part II. of these Outlines contains an alphabetical list of authors with their principal works. This will be specially useful in studying literature from the biographical point of view, which after all is the most usual and the most popular way of looking at it. It will be noticed that books not sufficiently important to be mentioned in Part I. are sometimes given under the author's name; since works of small significance in the general history of literature may be of real importance in analysing the life-work of the individual. In the selection of names I have not aimed at pedantic consistency. After laying down various arbitrary rules for my own guidance, I was obliged to fall back on compromise and general sense of proportion in determining whom and what to include. And although it seemed advisable to bring the dates down to 1889, the selection of works given in the last fifteen or twenty years is of course in the highest degree tentative. A few names are inserted which may have small claim to be there; while there are doubtless many omitted which should have found a place. In turning over the pages of literary reviews one is overwhelmed by the number of contemporary poets, novelists, and thinkers, who, according to the general consensus of critical opinion, have shown evidence of the possession of genius and have given earnest for the attainment of immortality. Of these it was impossible to include one-twentieth part; though in point of sheer literary merit the less known writers of the day are, * See The Fables of Aesop, edited by Joseph Jacobs. (Historical Introduction, p. 181.) no doubt, often incomparably superior to those of the 18th century. : It is necessary to say a few words about dates. A short examination of a few reference books in general use will at once show that the greatest discrepancy exists in the years assigned for the publication of a very large proportion of the works mentioned. To take a few instances at random Baxter's Saints' Rest is referred in some of the most popular manuals to 1649, 1658, and 1653; Mandeville's Fable of the Bees to 1711, 1714, 1723, and 1729; Pope's Temple of Fame to 1711, 1712, and 1715; Philip's Splendid Shilling to 1701, 1703, and 1705. Nor is this uncertainty confined to the older books; Browning's Sordello is given as 1839, 1840, and 1841; while for the Bon Gaultier Ballads I found the following dates, 1845, 1849, 1851, 1854, 1855, 1856. These uncertainties arise from various causes. Setting aside manifest errors originating in, say, one of Dr. Johnson's casual remarks that a poem was published "about" such or such a date, or in a misprint in the wilderness of Allibone, we have others such as these :-The date of a second edition is given as the date of a first; the title of a book has been changed, and the two dates are variously assigned to the book under its old title and under its new one; books published in the early months of a year before the adoption of the New Style are liable to be referred to the year before; books published during the last two or three months of a year are liable to be assigned to the next year owing to a well-known custom of the publishing trade. When a work has taken several years to publish, the date of the first or of the last instalment may be given. Besides such cases as these, there are other instances where no exact date is obtainable. Few books before the introduction of printing |