A Short History of English Literature (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

This 1898 survey evaluates English literature on its own merits, including the earliest Anglo-Saxon poems such as Beowulf, the early and late romances, the innovations of Chaucer and the Scottish poets, the genius of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Milton, Dryden, Pope, as well as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—with a section on Victorian literature.