FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626). _Essays._ _Wisdom of the Ancients._ _The Advancement of Learning._ There are many inexpensive editions of the “Essays,” and good texts of Bacon’s other work in English prose have been prepared for students. Owing to their brevity the “Essays” are the best known of Bacon’s prose work. But compared with the longer works of Bacon, they are scarcely more than _tours de force_, experiments in epigrammatic condensation. Not the young reader, but the mature reader who would know the Elizabethan age, its noblest thinker and the most eloquent prose contemporary with the King James Bible, will wish to read Bacon’s life and works in Spedding’s edition. THOMAS BROWNE (1605-82). _Religio Medici._ _Urn Burial._ _Enquiries into Vulgar Errors._ The three or four small books of this very great essayist are to be found in a volume of the _Golden Treasury Series_, and also in the fine little Dent edition. EDMUND BURKE (1729-97). _Speech on American Taxation._ _Speech on Conciliation with America._ _Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol._ A good edition of Burke’s principal speeches is that edited by F. G. Selby and published by Macmillan. The prescriptions of the schools have made the “Speech on Conciliation” familiar as a difficult thing to analyze rather than as a magnificent essay (for essay it is, though delivered as a speech). Burke’s other philosophic and political essays are among the great prose of his century and should be sought both by the student of history and by the reader of literature. JOHN BURROUGHS. _Birds and Poets._ _Locusts and Wild Honey._ _Wake-Robin._ After Thoreau Mr. Burroughs is the most distinguished of modern writers on nature and out-of-door life. THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881). _Sartor Resartus._ _Heroes and Hero-Worship._ _Past and Present._ _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays._ “Heroes and Hero-Worship” is, for the beginner, the best, because the clearest, of Carlyle’s work. Carlyle’s opinions become of less and less consequence as time passes, and he remains great by virtue of the superbly eloquent passages in which the poet overcomes the preacher. He is an illustrious example of the fact that nothing passes so rapidly as the beliefs of a day which a preacher hurls at the world about him--and at posterity,--and also of the fact that eloquence and beauty survive the original burning question which gave them life and which later generations are interested in only from a biographic and historic point of view. The essay carries in it the journalistic bacteria that make for its speedy dissolution, but the poetic thought, whatever the occasion of its utterance, outlives circumstance and changes of ideas and taste. CICERO. _Letters and Orations._ In English, in _Everyman’s Library_. SAMUEL MCCHORD CROTHERS. _The Gentle Reader._ The most charming and humorously wise of living American essayists. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834). _Biographia Literaria._ _Lectures on Shakespeare._