His literary works include numerous translations from the Greek, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; several books of verse; the book of short stories The Twilight of the Gods (1888, 16 stories; 12 stories added in the 1903 edition);[4] biographies of Thomas Carlyle, John Milton, William Blake, and others; The Age of Dryden (1895); Essays of an Ex-Librarian (1901);[5] a History of Italian Literature; English Literature: An Illustrated Record (with Edmund Gosse); and many articles for encyclopaedias, including the ninth and tenth editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica,[6] and the Dictionary of National Biography.

He also discovered and edited some unpublished poems of Shelley (Relics of Shelley, 1862) and edited the republication of the newly discovered poetry collection Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire in 1898.

His poem Where Corals Lie was set to music by Sir Edward Elgar as part of Sea Pictures and was first performed in 1899.

Long interested in astrology, in 1880 he published a monograph on the subject, "The Soul and the Stars", in the University Magazine under the pseudonym "A. G. Trent"; ill health prevented him from writing more on the subject.

[8] He died on 13 April 1906 and was buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.