For literary texts and selections for reading a few general collections, such as are given below, are useful; but the important works of each author may now be obtained in excellent and inexpensive school editions.  At the beginning of the course the teacher, or the home student, should write for the latest catalogue of such publications as the Standard English Classics, Everyman’s Library, etc., which offer a very wide range of reading at small cost.  Nearly every publishing house issues a series of good English books for school use, and the list is constantly increasing.

HISTORY

Text-books: Montgomery’s English History; Cheyney’s Short History of England (Ginn and Company).

General Works: Green’s Short History of the English People, 1 vol., or A History of the English People, 4 vols. (American Book Co.).

Traill’s Social England, 6 vols. (Putnam).

Bright’s History, of England, 5 vols., and Gardiner’s Students’ History of
England (Longmans).

Gibbins’s Industrial History of England, and Mitchell’s English Lands,
Letters, and Kings, 5 vols. (Scribner).

Oxford Manuals of English History, Handbooks of English History, and
Kendall’s Source Book of English History (Macmillan).

Lingard’s History of England until 1688 (revised, 10 vols., 1855) is the standard Catholic history.

Other histories of England are by Knight, Froude, Macaulay, etc.  Special works on the history of each period are recommended in the preceding chapters.

HISTORY OF LITERATURE

Jusserand’s Literary History of the English People, 2 vols. (Putnam).

Ten Brink’s Early English Literature, 3 vols. (Holt).

Courthope’s History of English Poetry (Macmillan).

The Cambridge History of English Literature, many vols., incomplete
(Putnam).

Handbooks of English Literature, 9 vols. (Macmillan).

Garnett and Gosse’s Illustrated History of English Literature, 4 vols. 
(Macmillan).

Morley’s English Writers, 11 vols. (Cassell), extends through Elizabethan literature.  It is rather complex and not up to date, but has many quotations from authors studied.

Taine’s English Literature (many editions), is brilliant and interesting, but unreliable.

LITERARY CRITICISM

Lowell’s Literary Essays.

Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets.

Mackail’s The Springs of Helicon (a study of English poetry from Chaucer to
Milton).

Dowden’s Studies in Literature, and Dowden’s Transcripts and Studies.

Minto’s Characteristics of English Poets.

Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism.

Stevenson’s Familiar Studies in Men and Books.

Leslie Stephen’s Hours in a Library.

Birrell’s Obiter Dicta.

Hales’s Folia Litteraria.