Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by William Quiller Orchardson, William Powell Frith and John Everett Millais. English writing from Beowulf to Tennyson, told to children as a story with the poets as its characters and long passages quoted so that they can hear the thing itself. Henrietta Marshall wrote it in 1909, after "Our Island Story", and it was the book that gave two generations their first Chaucer and their first Milton. She is unfashionable about taste and honest about it, and the quotations are chosen by someone who loved them. Sixty paintings by Hogarth, Gilbert and their peers, from Piccadilly to the Tour de Remy, set the English scene behind the English page.