Mrs. Cooper frequently comments on the difficulty and expense of gathering material for her enterprise and gratefully acknowledges "the generous Assistance of the Candid Mr. Oldys." Biographical data were also obtained only through most patient effort. The only _Lives of the Poets_ to which she could have access were Wood's _Athenæ Oxoniensis_ and the works of Phillips, Winstanley, and Jacob. Edward Phillips's _Theatrum Poetarum_ appeared in 1675. Its first volume gave brief biographical and critical notes on sixty-four authors from Robert of Gloucester to George Chapman, thus covering about the same ground as Mrs. Cooper's first volume which closes with Samuel Daniel. William Winstanley's _Lives of the English Poets_ was published in 1687. It includes notes on poets from William the Conqueror to James II with occasional brief illustrative extracts. _The Poetical Register_ of Giles Jacob (1724) is, in the first volume, confined to dramatists and is based on Langbain. The second volume, _The Lives and Characters of the English Poets_, extends about a century and a quarter later than Mrs. Cooper's volume. In the period before 1600 about half the names in her volume are included and briefly commented on. Jacob also gives an occasional extract. Mrs. Cooper was not, then, without predecessors in her undertaking. The novelty in her book was her assumption that people would not only like to know about the old poets, but that there would be many lovers of literature who would rejoice in reading the old poems, and very nearly in their original antiquated form. She gives ten pages from Langland, eleven from Barclay, twenty-eight from Sackville, twenty-four from Churchyard, thirty-five from Fulke Greville, thirty-one from Fairfax, and so on. Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare are less fully represented, as being already well known. The selections are the result of wide reading and are made because they pleased Mrs. Cooper's own taste. "What has given me Pleasure in my Closet," she says, "I have undertaken to recommend to the Publick; not presuming to inform the Judgment, but only awaken the Attention." That she failed to "awaken Attention" was the fault of the age. Her selections were representative and interesting.