<DIV>These nine novels are "the best of the best"?great writing by some of the most brilliant literary minds of the 18th and 19th centuries.<BR><BR>Samuel Johnson's biography of Richard Savage raises the life of a scoundrel to the level of great art; George Eliot profoundly influenced Henry James with her horror story, <I>The Lifted Veil</I>; Le Fanu writes a "sinister but gracious" supernatural Gothic; <I>Nightmare Abbey</I> is Thomas Love Peacock's satire on his friends, the Romantic poets Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron.<BR><BR>These, with other short novels in this collection, represent the pinnacle of achievement in their genre.</DIV>