Author names not noted above: Ben Jonson, Abraham Cowley, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Sydney Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf.

Volume XXVII features 24 important essays from 17 essential English writers, including:

• "The Defense of Poesy" by Sir Philip Sidney
• "On Shakespeare" and "On Bacon" by Ben Jonson
• "Of Agriculture" by Abraham Cowley
• "The Vision of Mirza" and "Westminster Abbey" by Joseph Addison
• "The Spectator Club" by Sir Richard Steele
• "Hints Towards an Essay on Conversation," "A Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding," "A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet," and "On the Death of Esther Johnson (Stella)" by Jonathan Swift
• "The Shortest-Way With the Dissenters" and "The Education of Women" by Daniel Defoe
• "Life of Addison, 1672-1719" by Samuel Johnson
• "Of the Standard of Taste" by David Hume
• "Fallacies of Anti-reformers" by Sydney Smith
• "On Poesy or Art" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• "Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen" by William Hazlitt
• "Deaths of Little Children" and "On the Realities of Imagination" by Leigh Hunt
• "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare" by Charles Lamb
• "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow" by Thomas De Quincey
• "A Defense of Poetry" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• "Machiavelli" by Thomas Babington Macaulay.