Pamphleteer; journalist; had a very troubled and changeful career. Robinson Crusoe (1719); _The True-born Englishman_; Journal of the Plague; The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; and more than a hundred books and pamphlets in all. He is one of the most taking writers that ever lived. JONATHAN SWIFT, 1667-1745. Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin; satirist; poet; prose-writer. Battle of the Books; Tale of a Tub (1704); Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Many of the ablest political pamphlets of the day. A number of _Poems_. His prose was the strongest and most nervous prose written in the eighteenth century. SIR RICHARD STEELE, 1671-1729. Gentleman usher to Prince George; a fashionable man about town. Essays in the Tatler, in the Spectator, in the Guardian--all of them a kind of magazine. A few plays. JOSEPH ADDISON, 1672-1719. Secretary of State. Essays in the Tatler, in the Spectator, and in the Guardian. _Cato_: a tragedy (1713). Several short _Poems_. His prose is the finest, most genial, and most delicate of all the prose-writings of the eighteenth century. ALEXANDER POPE, 1688-1744. Poet; a Roman Catholic. _Essay on Criticism_ (1711); _Rape of the Lock_--the story of the stealing of a lock of hair; _Translations of the Iliad and Odyssey_, half of the latter done by assistants (1715-20); the _Dunciad_; _Essay on Man_. A few essays in prose; and a volume of Letters. JAMES THOMSON, 1700-1748. Poet; held sinecure cure offices under government. _The Seasons_--a poem in blank verse; _The Castle of Indolence_, a poem in the nine-lined stanza of Edmund Spenser. HENRY FIELDING, 1707-1754. Novelist and journalist. Many comedies--now forgotten. Joseph Andrews (1742); Tom Jones (1749); Amelia (1751). He was the ‘first great English novelist, and he remains to this day one of the greatest.’ DAVID HUME, 1711-1776. Librarian; secretary to the British Embassy in France. Treatise of Human Nature (1737); Essays (1742); Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals; History of England (1754-62). Writes very clear and pleasant prose. DR SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784. Schoolmaster; literary man; dictionary-maker. _London_ (1738); the _Vanity of Human Wishes_; The Rambler (1750-52); The Idler; English Dictionary (1755); Rasselas, a kind of novel; Lives of the Poets; and other prose works. THOMAS GRAY, 1716-1771. Poet; letter-writer; professor of Modern History, Cambridge. Odes; _Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_, one of the most pleasing, perfect, and oft-quoted poems in the language. He was also a good letter-writer. WILLIAM ROBERTSON, 1721-1793. Clergyman; historian; Principal of the University of Edinburgh.