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Primarily oil portraits of 18th century literary figures. There are also engravings, and pen and ink and pencil sketches. Among the literary figures are portraits of Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle; Colley Cibber; Charles Dickens; John Evelyn; John Foxe; David Garrick; Thomas Gray; Charles Lamb; Sir Thomas More; Sir Walter Raleigh; Samuel Richardson; Richard B. Sheridan; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; William M. Thackeray; and others. There is also a portrait by Blanche Ames of George A. Plimpton. Among the artists represented in the collection are James Maubert, Frederick Sandys, and William Hogarth (attrib.)

A collection of letters, manuscripts, proofs, and drawings of English and American authors, including 33 letters from Alan Gabriel Barnsley (Gabriel Fielding) to Derek Stanford; a letter from James Boswell to George Colman the younger; a letter from Wilkie Collins; a letter from James Fenimore Cooper to William Buell Sprague; a letter from Dinah Maria Mulock Craik; letters from E.M. Forster; letters from Sarah Grand to James B. Pond; letters from T.B. Macauley; a letter from Hester Lynch Piozzi to James Robson; letters and cards from G.B. Shaw; letters from R.B. Sheridan to Thomas Grenville and to C. Ward, and a letter from Elizabeth Ann Linley Sheridan to R.B. Sheridan; a letter from William Wordsworth to F.W. Faber; a letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Benjamin Disraeli; letters from Anthony Trollope written to Frederic Chapman, Mary Christie, J.T. Fields, Frederic Harrison, and others; letters from Ellen Terry and Rhoda Broughton, and postcards from Evelyn Waugh to Graham Ackroyd. The manuscripts include examples by Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen, John Burroughs, Ivy Compton-Burnett, A.E. Coppard, Baron Corvo, Cecil Day Lewis, Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster, George Gissing, Sarah Grand, A.P. Herbert, Rudyard Kipling, Edward Lear, Henry W. Longfellow, Amy Lowell, John Wilmot 2nd Earl of Rochester, G.B. Shaw, Edith Sitwell, and Logan Pearsall Smith.