- Initial publication of the first series: works separately published between 1878 and 1892, identified as part of the English Men of Letters series, but not in numbered volumes:
- Leslie Stephen (1879), Samuel Johnson • James Cotter Morison (1879), Gibbon • Richard H. Hutton (1879), Sir Walter Scott • John Addington Symonds (1879), Shelley • Thomas Henry Huxley (1879), Hume • William Black (1879), Goldsmith • William Minto (1879), Daniel Defoe • John Campbell Shairp (1879), Robert Burns • R. W. Church (1879), Spenser • Anthony Trollope (1879), Thackeray • John Morley (1879), Burke • Mark Pattison (1879), Milton • Henry James (1879), Hawthorne • Edward Dowden (1879), Southey • Adolphus William Ward (1879), Chaucer • Goldwin Smith (1880), Cowper • James Anthony Froude (1879), Bunyan • John Nichol (1880), Byron • Thomas Fowler (1880), Locke • Leslie Stephen (1880), Alexander Pope • Alfred Ainger (1882), Charles Lamb • David Masson (1881), Quincey • Sidney Colvin (1881), Landor • George Saintsbury (1881), Dryden • F. W. H. Myers (1881), Wordsworth • Richard Claverhouse Jebb (1882), Bentley • Leslie Stephen (1882), Swift • Adolphus William Ward (1882), Dickens • Edmund Gosse (1882), Gray • H. D. Traill (1882), Sterne • James Cotter Morison (1882), Macaulay • Austin Dobson (1883), Fielding • Mrs. Oliphant (1883), Sheridan • W. J. Courthope (1884), Addison • R. W. Church (1884), Bacon • H. D. Traill (1884), Coleridge • John Addington Symonds (1886), Sir Philip Sidney • Sidney Colvin (1887), Keats • John Nichol (1892), Thomas Carlyle
- the Portrait Edition: a reprint of the first series works, grouped into numbered volumes.
- the second series: works published between 1902 and 1919.