Introduction -- Poetic diction in English / R. Bridges -- Shakespeare and the grand style / George Saintsbury -- Dickens as a man of letters / Alice Meynell -- The reaction against Tennyson / A.C. Bradley -- George Eliot / George Moore -- Pope / W.P. Ker -- Theodore Watts-Dunton / A.C. Benson -- Matthew Arnold / Sir E.K. Chambers -- Ouida / Max Beerbohm -- Wordsworth and literary criticism / J.A. Chapman -- The profession of poetry / H.W. Garrod -- Robert Burton / Desmond MacCarthy -- William Cowper, an Englishman / E.M. Forster -- Mandell Creighton / Lytton Strachey -- The function of poetry in drama / Lascelles Abercrombie -- The textual criticism of English classics / R.W. Chapman -- A word for Gabriel Harvey / G.M. Young -- Robert Bridges / Charles Williams -- Johnson 'London' and 'Vanity' / T.S. Eliot -- Pure poetry / J.M. Murry -- Thomas Hardy / Bonamy Dobree -- The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins / Herbert Read -- Browning / F.L. Lucas -- Modern fiction / Virginia Woolf.