A BRIEF HANDBOOK OF ENGLISH AUTHORS
BY OSCAR FAY ADAMS
BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1884
Copyright, 1883,
By OSCAR FAY ADAMS.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge:
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Links to Author Name first letters
PREFACE.
This brief handbook is intended simply forevery-day use, when reference to larger works ofthe kind may not be convenient. Experience hasproved that the small book which can be readilytaken up is consulted far more frequently than theponderous volume that requires great muscularexertion to lift.
In the world of letters as in the world of societyconventionality plays no unimportant part, asevery student of literature knows. That there issuch a thing as "conventional immortality" everybiographical dictionary yields abundant evidence.Even so small a work as this must necessarily containmany names that have achieved this conventionalimmortality through the accident ofcircumstance. Some literary fames are among thelegacies left by preceding centuries to the presentone to account for and explain. And when allis said, "the iniquity of oblivion blindly