Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Matthew Wheaton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net A BRIEF HANDBOOK OF ENGLISH AUTHORS BY OSCAR FAY ADAMS BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1884 Copyright, 1883, By OSCAR FAY ADAMS. _All rights reserved._ _The Riverside Press, Cambridge_: Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. PREFACE. This brief handbook is intended simply for every-day use, when reference to larger works of the kind may not be convenient. Experience has proved that the small book which can be readily taken up is consulted far more frequently than the ponderous volume that requires great muscular exertion to lift. In the world of letters as in the world of society conventionality plays no unimportant part, as every student of literature knows. That there is such a thing as "conventional immortality" every biographical dictionary yields abundant evidence. Even so small a work as this must necessarily contain many names that have achieved this conventional immortality through the accident of circumstance. Some literary fames are among the legacies left by preceding centuries to the present one to account for and explain. And when all is said, "the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy and dealeth with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity." OSCAR FAY ADAMS. ERIE, PA., _October 28, 1883_. PUBLISHERS REFERRED TO IN THIS VOLUME.