George Saintsbury: 26 books

This 1898 survey evaluates English literature on its own merits, including the earliest Anglo-Saxon poems such as Beowulf, the early and late romances, the innovations of Chaucer and the Scottish poets, the genius of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Milton, Dryden, Pope, as well as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—with a section on Victorian literature.

In beginning what, if it ever gets finished, must in all probability be the last of some already perhaps too numerous studies of literary history, I should like to point out that the plan of it is somewhat different from that of most, if not all, of its predecessors. I have usually gone on the principle...

Published in 1912, this scholarly exploration of meter and rhythm begins with ancient Greece and Rome; moving through Old and Middle English; Chaucer; the ornate and plain styles; Edmund Burke; the great novelists of the nineteenth century such as Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray; the lyrical prose of John Ruskin; and more. It is one of the very few full-length studies of prose rhythm.

I believe that, in my present plan, there is no author of importance omitted (there were not many even in the first edition), and that I have been able somewhat to improve the book from the results of twenty years' additional study, twelve of which have been mainly devoted to English literature.

The brilliant military career of John Churchill, the First Duke of Malrborough (1650-1722), spanned five monarchs and included shifting loyalties. This 1885 life story tries to correct the imbalance of previous biographies—giving ample space to each part  of the Duke’s life—and emphasizes his...

Scott's own 'autobiographic fragment,' printed in Lockhart's first volume, has made other accounts of his youth mostly superfluous, even to a day which persists in knowing better about everything and everybody than it or they knew about themselves. No one ever recorded his genealogy more minutely,...

In the execution of the present task (which I took over about two years ago from hands worthier than mine, but then more occupied) some difficulties of necessity occurred which did not present themselves to myself when I undertook the volume of Elizabethan Literature, or to my immediate predecessor in...

     From the time of Malherbe the system of schools begins, divided according to subjects. The poet, the dramatist, the historian, have their predecessors, and either intentionally copy them or intentionally innovate upon them. Malherbe and Delille, Corneille and Lemercier, Sarrasin and Rulhière,...

This Memorial Volume is being published to mark the centenary year of George Saintbury's birth. It contains essays, hitherto uncollected in book form, on authors such as Dryden, Herrick, Ben Jonson, Browning, Coleridge; studies of Carlyle, Jane Welsh Carlyle, Shelley, Disraeli; and papers on subjects...

The Editors of the Saintsbury Memorial Volume have been encouraged by the welcome which that book received to make a final gathering of George Saintbury's writings. From a score of different sources they have chosen essays and papers that have lain uncollected, with their themes ranging from...