'[Garratt] spent his free evenings in Birmingham's Central Free Library reading Homer, Epitectus, Longius and Plato's Dialogues, a classical education which further undemined his confidence in the status quo: "I began to wonder in what way we had advanced from the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome". In the First World War, he took Palgrave's Golden Treasury with him to France and wrote his own verses in the trenches'..
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: V.W. Garratt Print: Book
The seventeenth-century waterman-poet John Taylor had read More's Utopia, Plato's Republic, Montaigne, and Cervantes in translation, but he never mastered a foreign language and he relentlessly satirised latinate prose:
I ne'er used Accidence so much as now,
Nor all these Latin words here interlaced
I do not know if they with sense are placed,
I in the book did find them".'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: John Taylor Print: Book
"Deist" and "heathen" authors studied by the young Frances Power Cobbe: "Gibbon, Hume, Tindal, Collins, and Voltaire ... Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch's Moralia, Xenophon's Memorabilia, and a little Plato."
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Frances Power Cobbe Print: Book
'Weaver-novelist William Holt extolled the standard greats ("Noble Carlyle; virtuous Tolstoi; wise Bacon; jolly Rabelais; towering Plato...") and, having taught himself German, memorized Schiller while working at the looms. But he did not limit himself to classics: "I read omnivorously, greedily, promiscuously", from dime novels and G.A. Henty to Hardy and Conrad. Holt disparaged popular authors such as Ethel M. Dell and Elinor Glyn for "peddling vulgar narcotics", yet he was closely attuned to the mass reading public. His own autobiography sold a quarter of a million copes and he once owned a fleet of bookmobiles. He reconciled taste with populism through this logic: though most readers consume a certain amount of junk, it does them no harm because they recognize it as junk'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William Holt Print: Book
'Wednesday April 14th. [...] Read S--'s translation of Plato's Symposium.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Manuscript: Unknown
'Thursday April 15th. [...] Read Plato's Symposium.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Manuscript: Unknown
'Friday April 16 -- Finish the Symposium of Plato'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Manuscript: Unknown
'Thursday August 10th. Finish Caleb Williams -- Read Symposion [sic] [...] Translate
Demosthenes. Read Saggio Istorico.
[...]
'Friday August 11th. Read Symposion [sic].'
Unknown
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont
'Wednesday June [...] 29th. [...] Begin Mendelsohn's [sic] translation of Plato's Phaedon. and
Memoirs of Marmontel.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd, 21 December 1829:
'I have been reading over again Plato's Phaedon [...] The reasoning seems to me very
inconsecutive & inconclusive [...] But the style is a veil of golden tissue, like that which over-
hung the countenance of Moore's Veiled Prophet [in Lalla Rookh]: and let no-one upraise it!
[...] Do you recollect the chapters on natural philosophy? How splendid they are!'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Lady Margaret Cocks, 15 November 1833:
'Just at this moment I am busy with Plato, trying to find out from the Parmenides what
[italics]one[end italics] is and what it is not.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd, 5 March 1842:
'I had two volumes of Euripedes [sic] with me in Devonshire -- & have read him as well as
Aeschylus & Sophocles [...] both before & since I went there. You know I have gone through
every line of the three tragedians, long ago, in the way of regular, consecutive reading.
'You know also that I had at different times read different dialogues of Plato: but when three
years ago, & a few months previous to my leaving home, I became possessed of a complete
edition of his works edited by Bekker, why then I began with the first volume & went through
the whole of his writings [...] one after another, -- & have at this time read all that is properly
attributed to Plato, but even those dialogues & epistles which pass falsely under his name, --
everything except two books I think, or three, of that treatise "De legibus" which I shall finish
in a week or two'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd, 5 January 1843:
'Did I tell you that I have been reading through an M.S. translation of the Gorgias of Plato, by
a Mr Hyman of Oxford, who is a step-son of Mr Haydon's the artist? It is an excellent
translation with learned notes -- but it is [italics]not elegant[end italics]. He means to try the
public upon it -- but as I have intimated to him, the Christians of the present day are not
civilized enough for Plato.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Manuscript: Unknown
'[Roger] Ascham (1515-68) [...] visited the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey (1537-54) in 1550 and
describes in [italics]The Scholemaster[end italics] (1570) how he found her reading Plato while
the rest of the household was out hunting.'
Century: 1500-1599 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Jane Grey Print: Book
Many MS dates of reading: "Feb 13 1907 Welcombe"; "Nov 10 1909 Rome (Read in one day)"; "June 1915 Welcombe"; "October 1921 Wallington Have read the Euthyphron 6 times in 15 years." Includes a MS list of "My personal favourites in the dialogues of Plato". MS. notes in ink copied from Macaulay's folio edition of this text; this edition also belonged to Macaulay.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: George Otto Trevelyan
From Hallam Tennyson's account 'Of My Father's Illness':
'Jan.15th. [1889] My father asked Jowett whether his faith in God was more earnest than it had been. He answered, "Yes, certainly." He read my father the fine comparison between the philosopher and the lawyer in the Thaetetus.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Benjamin Jowett Print: Book
From Hallam Tennyson's account 'Of My Father's Illness':
'Jan. 29th. [1889] Read the Vision of Er. He pitied Ardiaeus and said, "That is eternal hell which I do not believe." I read to him some of Book II. of the Republic.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
From Hallam Tennyson's account 'Of My Father's Illness':
'Jan. 29th. [1889] Read the Vision of Er. He pitied Ardiaeus and said, "That is eternal hell which I do not believe." I read to him some of Book II. of the Republic.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Hallam Tennyson Print: Book
George Grote to G. C. Lewis, September 1840:
'Since you departed from London, I have been reading some of Kant's "Kritik der reinen
Vernunft," a book which always leads me into very instructive trains of metaphysical thought,
and which I value exceedingly, though I am far from agreeing in all he lays down. I have also
been looking into Plato's "Timaeus" and "Parmenides," and some of Locke, and have been
writing down some of the thoughts generated in my mind by this philosophical melange.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
George Grote to G. C. Lewis, September 1840:
'Since you departed from London, I have been reading some of Kant's "Kritik der reinen
Vernunft," a book which always leads me into very instructive trains of metaphysical thought,
and which I value exceedingly, though I am far from agreeing in all he lays down. I have also
been looking into Plato's "Timaeus" and "Parmenides," and some of Locke, and have been
writing down some of the thoughts generated in my mind by this philosophical melange.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
'"The flowing beauty of his oral translations in class, whether of Thucydides, Plato, or Virgil was," one of his peers recalled, "a thing not easily to be forgotten." He "startled everyone", too, "in the classical medal examination, by walking easily away from us all in the viva voce on [Aeschylus's] 'Agamemnon'".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde Print: Book
'"The Dialogues of Plato" became one of Wilde's golden books. He marked and annotated most of the dialogues, and many of Jowett's [editor's] introductions.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde Print: Book
[Elizabeth Carter to Catherine Talbot, 5 March 1755:]
'I am obliged to you for the account of the new books, not one of which have reached Deal, except some novels, which I had not patience to read through. My present study is Plato's Republic. I have got through as much as I can read of Fielding's Miscellanies, which I never saw before. Did you ever read them? and are they not extremely good and extremely bad?'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Carter Print: Book
'Every available evening I spent in the reference room [at Birmingham Central Library], searching for books which put me in company with the literary giants of the past. The Iliad and Odyssey, the advice of Epictetus, the principles of Longinus and the logic of the Dialogues of Plato I studied with particular relish for their wisdom seemed to be capable of modern application.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vero Walter Garratt Print: Book
'I have a great dislike to having no book 'on hand'; so I made a pilgrimage to our Permanent
Library, determined if possible to seize upon Plato. To my great pleasure the new edition of him
lay there all fresh, and at my service. Evening is my time for reading now, when nothing occurs
to prevent. Thou must know that across a road which leads to the Church close to us, is a little
paddock (so we call such pieces of ground here) wherein are four or five large old walnut trees -
the only fine trees, excepting one elm, we can boast. Under the shade of one of these, and also
shaded by a sombre yew, we have an arbour, and there in the still evening I read Plato's
discourse on the Immortality of the Soul. It is full of profound and curious interest, and I read it
with delight; the dialogue form in which his theories are given adds greatly to their interest; the
familiarity with which each friend states his objections or adopts the arguments of Socrates,
brings the whole scene so vividly before you.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Eliza Ellis Print: Book