Study Editions
Classic English Essays, Explained Sentence by Sentence
Free annotated study editions of 56 classic essays, from Francis Bacon to G. K. Chesterton. Each has key vocabulary, glosses above hard words, sentences colour-coded by difficulty, a plain-English paraphrase of every sentence and a fun fact.
Useful for anyone preparing for the LSAT, GRE, SAT, GMAT, TOEFL or IELTS: these are the long, complex sentences and advanced words that reading-comprehension sections test, with every one explained.
Gaps in the numbering are essays from the anthology that could not be built (no public-domain text online, or still in copyright).
- 01
Of Truth
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
Bacon opens his final, enlarged collection of essays with this one.
- 02
- 03
- 04
- 05
- 06
A Chambermaid
Sir Thomas Overbury (and friends) (1581–1613)
A “character” is a short, witty prose sketch of a social type, a genre that was hugely fashionable in Jacobean England.
- 07
A Fair and Happy Milkmaid
Sir Thomas Overbury (probably John Webster) (Overbury 1581–1613; Webster c.1580–c.1632)
The most famous of the Overbury “characters,” and the opposite of the chambermaid: an idealised country girl whose beauty is natural, whose days are full of honest work, and whose mind is untroubled.
- 08
An Antiquary
John Earle (c.1601–1665)
Earle's Microcosmographie (“a description of the little world”) is the best-loved book of characters.
- 09
A Good Old Man
John Earle (c.1601–1665)
A warm, admiring portrait, and a deliberate contrast to Earle's antiquary: here is an “antique” truly worth loving.
- 10
A Pot-Poet
John Earle (c.1601–1665)
A “pot-poet” is a tavern hack who writes for beer money: cheap ballads about disasters, executions and monsters, sold on single printed sheets.
- 11
How the Distempers of these Times should affect Wise Men
Owen Feltham (c.1602–1668)
Feltham's Resolves are short moral essays, each ending in a personal resolution.
- 12
On Dreams
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682)
Browne was a doctor in Norwich and one of the most musical prose writers in English.
- 13
Of Anger
Thomas Fuller (1608–1661)
Fuller was famous for his wit, and this short essay is full of it.
- 14
A Degenerate Noble
Samuel Butler (1613–1680)
Butler, author of the comic poem Hudibras, wrote nearly 200 characters.
- 15
Of Charity, or the Love of God
Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667)
Taylor's Holy Living is a practical handbook of Christian devotion, famous for the beauty of its prose.
- 16
Of Avarice
Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)
Cowley wrote his essays after retiring from public life to a quiet country house, and they mix prose with his own verse translations.
- 17
Chaucer (from the Preface to the Fables)
John Dryden (1631–1700)
In his last book, Dryden retold several of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in modern verse, and in the preface he explains why.
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
Sir Roger in Westminster Abbey
Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
A year after his solemn walk among the tombs (essay 20), Mr.
- 23
- 24
On Recollections of Childhood
Sir Richard Steele (1672–1729)
Writing as “Isaac Bickerstaff,” Steele sets aside one evening a year to mourn his dead friends.
- 26
- 28
- 29
Conversation
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
Why are the most admired people in company so rarely the cleverest?
- 30
Debtors' Prisons (1)
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
In 18th-century England a creditor could have a debtor locked up indefinitely, until the debt was paid, which for a man in prison was often never.
- 31
Debtors' Prisons (2)
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
Johnson returns to debtors' prisons four months later, and this time he argues with numbers.
- 32
Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature
David Hume (1711–1776)
Are human beings noble or contemptible?
- 37
Dream-Children: A Reverie
Charles Lamb (1775–1834)
Lamb wrote this a few months after the death of his elder brother John.
- 38
from On Some of the Old Actors
Charles Lamb (1775–1834)
An old playbill for Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, from about 1790, sets Lamb remembering the actors of his youth.
- 39
On the Pleasure of Hating
William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
Hazlitt was a brilliant, combative critic who quarrelled with almost everyone he knew.
- 41
Getting Up on Cold Mornings
Leigh Hunt (1784–1859)
Leigh Hunt was a journalist, poet and friend of Keats, Shelley and Lamb.
- 42
On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth
Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859)
In Shakespeare's Macbeth, just after Macbeth murders King Duncan in his sleep, someone starts knocking at the castle gate.
- 44
Lord Clive (The Battle of Plassey)
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
Macaulay was the most popular historian and essayist of Victorian Britain, and his long review-essay on Robert Clive tells how a clerk of the East India Company became the soldier who won Bengal for Britain.
- 47
The Conservative
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
Emerson, the leading American essayist of his century and the voice of Transcendentalism, gave this lecture in a series on “The Times.” He was not a party politician.
- 48
The Haunted Mind
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
Before he wrote The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne spent years publishing short tales and sketches.
- 50
City of London Churches
Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
In his series The Uncommercial Traveller, Dickens wandered around London and wrote up what he saw, as a traveller who sold nothing but observations.
- 51
Autour de mon Chapeau
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863)
Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, edited the new Cornhill Magazine and filled it with rambling, chatty “Roundabout Papers.” The French title means “Around my hat,” a joke on Xavier de Maistre's Voyage autour de ma chambre (Journey around my room).
- 53
Night and Moonlight
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Thoreau, author of Walden, took regular night walks around Concord, Massachusetts, in the early 1850s and filled his journal with them.
- 56
Heine and the Philistines
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
Matthew Arnold, poet, school inspector and Oxford Professor of Poetry, made the word “Philistine” famous in English.
- 57
Evolution and Ethics
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
Huxley, the biologist nicknamed “Darwin's Bulldog,” spent his career defending evolution.
- 61
On Knowing what Gives us Pleasure
Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
Samuel Butler, author of the satirical novel Erewhon and the posthumous The Way of All Flesh, filled notebooks for decades with sharp little reflections.
- 63
Sandro Botticelli
Walter Pater (1839–1894)
Walter Pater, an Oxford don, changed how the English looked at art.
- 65
Disintroductions
Ambrose Bierce (1842–?1914)
Ambrose Bierce, a Civil War veteran and San Francisco newspaper columnist, was nicknamed “Bitter Bierce” for his savage wit; his best-known book is The Devil's Dictionary.
- 66
The Ph.D. Octopus
William James (1842–1910)
William James, the Harvard philosopher and founder of American psychology (and brother of the novelist Henry James), saw the research doctorate spread through American universities in his lifetime.
- 67
London
Henry James (1843–1916)
Henry James, the American novelist of The Portrait of a Lady, settled in London in 1876 and lived in England for the rest of his life.
- 68
Under the Early Stars
Alice Meynell (1847–1922)
Alice Meynell was a poet, journalist, campaigner for women's suffrage and the mother of eight children.
- 69
The Acorn-Gatherer
Richard Jefferies (1848–1887)
Richard Jefferies grew up on a Wiltshire farm and became the great English writer of the countryside.
- 70
Æs Triplex
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, was ill with lung disease for most of his life and knew he might die young.
- 71
The True Critic
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Oscar Wilde, the Irish wit, playwright and author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, liked to turn common sense upside down.
- 73
The Censor of Plays: An Appreciation
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
Joseph Conrad, born in Poland, became a sea captain and then one of the great novelists in English (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim).
- 74
A Visit to Walt Whitman
James Gibbons Huneker (1857–1921)
James Huneker was an American music and art critic from Philadelphia, famous for his energetic, gossipy, name-dropping style.
- 79
On the Departure of a Guest
Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953)
Hilaire Belloc, born in France and raised in England, was a poet, historian, politician and a famous writer of comic verse for children.
- 80
- 81
On Sandals and Simplicity
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)
In Heretics, Chesterton argues with the famous thinkers and fashions of his day.