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Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The ...
Poet, born in Norfolk; studied at Douay, and became a Jesuit priest; came to England as a missionary, was thrown into prison, tortured ten times by the rack, and at length executed at Tyburn as a traitor for disseminating Catholic doctrine; his poems are religious chiefly, and excellent, and were finally collected under the title "St. Peter's Complaint," "Mary Magdalen's Tears, and Other Works"; "The Burning Babe" is characterised by Professor Saintsbury as a "splendid poem" (1560-1595).
Industry:Language
Poet, born, of good parentage, at Whitton, Middlesex; quitted Cambridge in 1628 to travel on the Continent, and for a time served in the army of Gustavus Adolphus in Germany; returning to England about 1632 he became a favourite at Court, where he was noted for his wit, prodigality, and verses; supported Charles in the Bishops' Wars against the Scots; sat in the Long Parliament; was involved in a plot to rescue Strafford, and to bring foreign troops to the aid of the king, but discovered, had to flee the country; died, probably by his own hand, in Paris; wrote several forgotten plays, a prose treatise on "Religion by Reason," and miscellaneous poems, amongst which are his charming songs and ballads, his title to fame (1609-1642).
Industry:Language
Poet, son of the Duke of Norfolk; early attached to the court of Henry VIII., he attended his royal master at the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," and took part in the coronation ceremony of Anne Boleyn (1533); was created a Knight of the Garter in 1542, and two years later led the English army in France with varying success; imprisoned along with his father on a charge of high treason, for which there was no adequate evidence, he was condemned and executed; as one of the early leaders of the poetic renaissance, and introducer of the sonnet and originator of blank verse, he deservedly holds a high place in the history of English literature (1516-1547).
Industry:Language
Poet-laureate, born at Somersby, in Lincolnshire, son of a clergyman, and of aristocratic descent; was educated at the grammar school of Louth and at Trinity College, Cambridge, which latter he left without taking a degree; having already devoted himself to the "Ars Poetica," an art which he cultivated more and more all his life long; entered the university in 1828, and issued his first volume of poems in 1830, though he had four years previously contributed to a small volume conjointly with a brother; to the poems of 1830 he added others, and published them in 1833 and 1842, after which, endowed by a pension from the Civil List of £200, he produced the "Princess" in 1847, and "In Memoriam" in 1850; was in 1851 appointed to the laureateship, and next in that capacity wrote his "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington"; in 1855 appeared his "Maud," in 1859 the first four of his "Idylls of the King," which were followed by "Enoch Arden" and the "Northern Farmer" in 1864, and by a succession of other pieces too numerous to mention here; he was raised to the peerage in 1884 on the recommendation of Mr. Gladstone; he was a poet of the ideal, and was distinguished for the exquisite purity of his style and the harmony of his rhythm; had a loving veneration for the past, and an adoring regard for everything pure and noble, and if he indulged in a vein of sadness at all, as he sometimes did, it was when he saw, as he could not help seeing, the feebler hold regard for such things had on the men and women of his generation than the worship of Mammon; Carlyle thought affectionately but plaintively of him, "One of the finest-looking men in the world," he writes to Emerson; "never had such company over a pipe!... a truly interesting son of earth and son of heaven ... wanted a task, with which that of spinning rhymes, and naming it 'art' and 'high art' in a time like ours, would never furnish him" (1809-1892).
Industry:Language
Poet-laureate, born in Dublin, where he was educated at Trinity College; came to London to ply the craft of letters, and in 1690 succeeded Shadwell in the laureateship; improvident, and probably intemperate, he died in the Mint, the refuge of bankrupts in those days; wrote some dramatic pieces, but is to be remembered mainly for his metrical version of the Psalms, executed in conjunction with Nicholas Brady, which superseded the older version done by Sternhold and Hopkins (1652-1715).
Industry:Language
Poet-laureate, born, the son of a linen-draper, at Bristol; was expelled from Westminster School for a satirical article in the school magazine directed against flogging; in the following year (1793) entered Balliol College, where he only remained one year, leaving it a Unitarian and a red-hot republican; was for a time enamoured of Coleridge's wild pantisocratic scheme; married (1795) clandestinely Edith Frickes, a penniless girl, sister to Mrs. Coleridge, and in disgrace with his English relatives visited his uncle in Lisbon, where in six months he laid the foundation of his knowledge of Spanish history and literature; the Church and medicine had already, as possible careers, been abandoned, and on his return to England he made a half-hearted effort to take up law; still unsettled he again visited Portugal, and finally was relieved of pecuniary difficulties by the settlement of a pension on him by an old school friend, which he relinquished in 1807 on receiving a pension from Government; meanwhile had settled at Keswick, where he prosecuted with untiring energy the craft of authorship; "Joan of Arc," "Thalaba," "Madoc," and "The Curse of Kehama," won for him the laureateship in 1813, and in the same year appeared his prose masterpiece "The Life of Nelson"; of numerous other works mention may be made of his Histories of Brazil and the Peninsular War, Lives of Bunyan and Wesley, and "Colloquies on Society"; declined a baronetcy offered by Peel; domestic affliction—the death of children, and the insanity and death of his wife—saddened his later years, which were brightened in the last by his second marriage (1839) with the poetess and his twenty years' friend, Caroline Bowles; as a poet Southey has few readers nowadays; full of miscellaneous interest, vigour of narrative, and spirited rhythm, his poems yet lack the finer spirit of poetry; but in prose he ranks with the masters of English prose style "of a kind at once simple and scholarly" (1774-1843).
Industry:Language
Political and deistical writer, born in Derry, of Catholic parents; abandoned the Catholic faith; studied at Leyden and Oxford; his first work, "Christianity not Mysterious," which created a great stir, and was burned in Ireland by the common hangman; it was succeeded, along with others, by "Nazarenus," which traced Christianity to conflicting elements in the early Church; he was a disciple of Locke (1669-1722).
Industry:Language
Political economist, born in Kirkcaldy, Fife; studied at Glasgow and Oxford, went to Edinburgh and became acquainted with David Hume and his confrères; was appointed to the chair of Logic in Glasgow in 1751, and the year after of Moral Philosophy; produced in 1759 his "Theory of Moral Sentiments," visited Paris with the young Duke of Buccleuch, got acquainted with Quesnay, D'Alembert, and Necker, and returning in 1766, settled in his native place under a pension from the Duke of Buccleuch, where in 1776 he produced his "Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," a work to which he devoted 10 years of his life, and which has had a world-wide influence, and that has rendered his name world-famous; in 1778 he settled in Edinburgh as Commissioner of Customs for Scotland, and in 1787 was elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University (1723-1790).
Industry:Language
Political writer and wit, born at Woodford, Essex, of partly English and partly Huguenot blood; educated at Westminster and Oxford, bred for the Church; after a brief curacy in Wiltshire settled in Edinburgh from 1798 to 1803, where, while officiating as a clergyman, he became one of the famous editors of the Edinburgh Review, and a contributor; settled for a time afterwards in London, where he delivered a series of admirable lectures on ethics, till he was appointed to a small living in Yorkshire, and afterwards to a richer living in Somerset, and finally a canonry in St. Paul's; his writings deal with abuses of the period, and are, except his lectures perhaps, all out of date now (1771-1845).
Industry:Language
President of Harvard University, born in Connecticut; bred a carpenter, took to study, attended Harvard, where he graduated, studied theology, and became Unitarian, becoming a minister in that body, but retired from the ministry and settled in Boston; edited the North American Review; wrote and edited biographies of eminent Americans, and edited the writings of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington (1789-1866).
Industry:Language
