本书收入25位英美作家的30篇散文名篇，包括自17世纪的培根到20世纪30年代的D．H．劳伦斯等英国作家，以及自18世纪初的富兰克林到19世纪中期的部分美国作家的作品。有些是独立成篇的随笔，有些是从长篇著作中节选的片断。英美散文名篇浩如烟海，本书不打算求全，而且也不可能做到。不过，收入本书的应当说均属脍炙人口的佳作，其中有些也是国内外教材中必选的文本。此外，约有1/3的篇章曾是本人在教学中选用过的，实践证明它们大多受到比较广泛的欢迎。

Francis Bacon

Of Truth

Thomas Hobbes

Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their FeEcity and Misery

John Milton

Areopa#tlca (Excerpts)

John Dryden

Shakespeare and Ben Jooson Compared

Joseph Addison

Party Patches

Sunday in the Country

Richard Steele

Recollections of

Samuel Johnson

Pope and Dryden Compared

Letter to the Right Honourable the Eart of Chesterfield

Oliver Goldsmith

The Man in Black

Benjamin Franklin

The Autobiogrphy (Excerpt)

Chades Lamb

In Praise of Chimney-sweephers

old China

William Hazlitt

Thomas De Quincey

On the Knocking at the Caate m Macbeth

Washington Irving

The Author's Account of Himself

Thomas Carlyle

Labour

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Self-Reliance

Henry David Thoreau

Comclustion of Walden

John Ruskin

About Reading Books

St. Mark's

Robert Louis Stevenson

A Plea for Gas Lamps

El Dorado

George Robert Gissing

Spring (Excerpt)

Maurice Henry Hewlett

The Mayoole and the Column

Edward Verrall Lucas

A Philosopher That Failed

Hilaire Beiloc

The Crooked Streets

Virginia Woolf

The Patten and the Crocus

Alan Alexander Milne

Golden Fruit.

David Herbert Lawrence

Whistling of Birds