Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1854-1864. First Thus. Uniformly rebound in half calf over marbled paper-covered boards, gilt-stamped spines with raised bands and gilt-titled red morocco labels, endpapers and all edges marbled. 16mo. Includes the following works: William Wordsworth (7 vols.), S. T. Coleridge (3 vols.), Charles Churchill (3 vols.), Matthew Prior (2 vols.), John Gay (2 vols.), Edmund Spenser (5 vols.), Thomas Moore (6 vols.), John Skelton (3 vols.), Robert Herrick (2 vols.), Samuel Butler (2 vols.), Percy Shelley (3 vols.), Sir Walter Scott (9 vols.), Thomas Chatterton (2 vols.), James Thomson (2 vols.), James Montgomery (5 vols.), John Milton (3 vols.), Jonathan Swift (3 vols.), William Cowper (3 vols.), Edward Young (2 vols.), Alexander Pope (3 vols.), John Dryden (5 vols.), Thomas Hood (4 vols.), Robert Southey (10 vols.), Robert Burns (3 vols.), Lord Byron (10 vols.), one volume each of Oliver Goldsmith, George Herbert, John Donne, Mark Akenside, Thomas Parnell and Thomas Tickell, William Collins, Isaac Watts, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Gray, William Falconer, Henry Kirke White, Sir Thomas Wyatt, James Beattie, Shakespeare, Thomas Campbell, and John Keats, as well as Ballads (8 vols.). Most of the first volumes with portrait frontispiece and tissue guard.

6 1/2 x 4 1/2 in. each

Little, Brown & Company began publishing their British Poets series, a grand undertaking, in 1853.

Boards with occasional scuffing, light wear to extremities, and spotting; beautiful spines with minor wear; pages lightly toned with expected offsetting, occasional foxing concentrated at endpapers, and rare finger grime, wear to endpapers, or folded/worn edge; one volume with minor gutter cracking, one with marginalia, and one with small corner stain impacting a few leaves; vol. III of Spenser's works with cracking at head of front joint; a handsome and clean set with an occasional leaf still partially unopened; very good to near fine. Fairly scarce as a large set.