Published in 1687, Winstanley’s book gives short lives of English poets from Robert of Gloucester and Richard the Hermit through Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare to his own Restoration contemporaries. Much is gossip and borrowed anecdote, but it preserves what readers of the 1680s believed about their literary past.
A quaint early literary biography that later critics quarried, here with a scholarly introduction. Download the free EPUB.