The authors represented in this volume include Congreve (The Way of the World), Gay (The Beggar’s Opera), Dryden (Absalom and Achitophel and MacFlecknoe), Swift, Pope, Boswell, and Samuel Johnson.

List of authors included:
Samuel Butler
John Bunyan
George Savile, Marquess of Halifax
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
John Dryden
William Congreve
Jonathan Swift
John Philips
John Gay
Matthew Prior
Alexander Pope
Daniel Defoe
Samule Johnson
Joseph Addison
Richard Steele
Barnard Mandeville
James Boswell
Edward Gibbon
Edmund Burke
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Sir William Temple
Anthony Ashley Cooper
Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray
James Thomson
Edward Young
William Collins
Christopher Smart
Oliver Goldsmith
William Cowper
George Crabbe
Robert Burns
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Laurence Sterne