_Ben Jonson’s Dramatic and Poetical Works_, to be read also in selections. “O rare Ben Jonson!”
_Christopher Marlowe’s Dramatic Works_, especially “Tamburlaine,” “Doctor Faustus,” and “The Jew of Malta.” “He had in him all those brave translunary things which the first poets did have.”—DRAYTON.
_Beaumont and Fletcher_, and especially “The Faithful Shepherdess,” a play “very characteristic of Fletcher, being a mixture of tenderness, purity, indecency, and absurdity.”—HALLAM.
_John Webster’s Tragedies._ “To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit: this only a Webster can do.”—CHARLES LAMB.
_George Herbert’s Poems._ “In George Herbert there is poetry, and enough to spare; it is the household bread of his existence.”—GÉORGE MACDONALD.
_Milton’s Poetical Works._ The “Paradise Lost” was mentioned in the former list; but you cannot well do without his shorter poems also. “Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him.”—CHARLES LAMB.
_Pope’s Poetical Works._ “Come we now to Pope, that prince of sayers of acute and exquisite things.”—ROBERT CHAMBERS.
_Dryden’s Poems._ “Dryden is even better than Pope. He has immense masculine energies.”—IBID.
_Goldsmith’s Select Poems._ “No one like Goldsmith knew how to be at once natural and exquisite, innocent and wise, a man and still a child.”—EDWARD DOWDEN.
_The Poems of Robert Burns._ “Burns should be my stand-by of a winter night.”—J. H. MORSE.
_Wordsworth’s Select Poems._ “Nearest of all modern writers to Shakspeare and Milton, yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own.”—COLERIDGE.
_The Poems of Sir Walter Scott._ “Walter Scott ranks in imaginative power hardly below any writer save Homer and Shakspeare.”—GOLDWIN SMITH.
_The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning._ “Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’ is, as far as I know, the greatest poem which the century has produced in any language.”—RUSKIN.
_Coleridge’s Select Poems._ “The Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” and “Genevieve.” “These might be bound up in a volume of twenty pages, but they should be bound in pure gold.”—STOPFORD BROOKE.