[Marginalia]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
'Milton established a habit of serious reading, which brought Bamford to Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, the great poets, classic histories and voyages, and ultimately William Cobbett's Political Register'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford Print: Book
" ... it was whilst at a frivolous, rote-learning girls' school that ... [Frances Power Cobbe] developed her determined, methodical aproach [to reading] ... She read all the Faerie Queene, all of Milton's poetry, the Divina Commedia and Gerusalemme Liberata in the originals, and in translation the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Pharsalia, and ... [nearly all] of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Ovid, Tacitus, Xenophon, Herodotus and Thucydides."
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Frances Power Cobbe Print: Book
'I admire you for what you say of the fierce fighting "Iliad"... I am afraid this poem, noble as it truly is, has done infinite mischief for a series of ages; since to it, and its copy the "Eneid", is owing, in a great measure, the savage spirit that has actuated, from the earliest ages to this time, the fighting fellows that, worse than lions or tigers, have ravaged the earth, and made it a field of blood'.
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Richardson Print: Book
Mary Berry, Journal, 27 April 1791: 'Florence. -- Went to see the Laurentian Medicean Library [...] The librarian, a very civil Canonico Bandini, showed us the Virgil of the fourth century, which they call the oldest existing; it is very fairly written, but less easy to read than the one in the Vatican. We saw, too, the Horace that belonged to Petrarch, with some notes in it by his own hand. It is in large quarto, and not a beautiful manuscript from the number of notes and scoliastes interrupting and confusing the text.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Berry Manuscript: Unknown
'The marginalia [dating from late 1570s-c.1608] on fol.3v [of Lodovico Domenichi, "Facetie, motti et burle, di diversi signori et persone private" (1571)] record Eutrapelus's [i.e Gabriel Harvey's] reading:
'"What kinds of unique authors does Eutrapelus read daily? Eunapius, with Tacitus, Philostratus with Julian, Zwinger's "Theatre" with Gandino, Bartas with Rabelais, Theocritus's "Idyll I" with the epitaphs of Bion and Adonis. Three heroic shields (Homer, Hesiod, Virgil) with the "seventh day" of Bartas, Solomon's "Song of Songs" with the Behemoth of Job and the Leviathan"' (translated from Latin).
Century: 1500-1599 / 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Gabriel Harvey Print: Book
Harriet Martineau on school life: 'We learned Latin from the old Eton grammar [...] Cicero, Virgil, and a little Horace were our main reading then'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Pupils at Mr Perry's school Print: Book
'Sunday July 2nd. Do a latin Excercise [sic]. Read a little of the [...] Enead [quotes Book I
line 33].'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
'Tuesday July 4th. [...] Read Virgil -- Lines 100. Read Aristippe by Wieland.
[...]
'Wednesday July 5th. [...] Read 40 lines of Virgil'.
[Report 'Read Virgil' also appears in entries for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 July 1820]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
'Wednesday Sept. 27th. Do some Latin from Virgil [...] Finish Keats' Endymion.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
'At this period [aged thirteen] I perused all modern authors who had any claim to superior merit
& poetic excellence. I was familiar with Shakespeare Milton Homer and Virgil Locke Hooker
Pope -- I read Homer in the original with delight inexpressible together with Virgil.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd, 2 November 1832:
'I have read, since I spoke to you last about my Greek reading, the last line of the last ode of
Pindar, & have again gone thro' the Alcestis & the Troades; -- Besides this I have gone thro'
the whole of the Aeneid except two books which I was familiar with, and half the Hebrew
Bible. Forster's bible is in two quarto volumes, -- and one of them I have read regularly from
beginning to end'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
'That detestable father [italics]St Jerome[end italics], thus reacts to the Fall of Rome:--
'[...] When the refugees [...] began to reach Palestine: "I was long silent, knowing that it was the time for tears. Since to relieve them all was impossible, we joined our lamentations with theirs [...]" [...] Virgil's "Urbas antiqua ruit, multos dominata per annos" quoted, which I myself was to read 1500 [sic] later, after seeing the Docks on fire from my roof in Chiswick.
'[Extracted from Hodgkin. Jerome has to leave Rome for the desert because he found the ladies too charming there.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Book
'Whewell, who was [Tennyson's] tutor, he called "the lion-like man" and had for him a great respect. It is reported that Whewell, recognising his genius, tolerated in him certain informalities which he would not have overlooked in other men. Thus, "Mr Tennyson, what's the compound interest of a penny put out at the Christian era up to the present time?" was Whewell's good-natured call to attention in the Lecture Room while my father was reading Virgil under the desk.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
'Savile Morton wrote to his mother that he had "come across Alfred Tennyson." "We looked out some Latin translations of his poems by Cambridge men, and read some poems of Leigh Hunt's, and some of Theocritus and Virgil [...] I had no idea Virgil could ever sound so fine as it did by his reading....Yesterday I went to see him again. After some chat we sat down in two separate rooms to read Ellen Middleton, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton -- very highly spoken of."'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
'Throughout the autumn and winter evenings [of 1854] he [Alfred Tennyson] translated aloud to my mother the sixth Aeneid of Virgil and Homer's description of Hades, and they read Dante's Inferno together. Whewell's Plurality of Worlds he also carefully studied. "It is to me anything," he writes, "but a satisfactory book. It is inconceivable that the whole Universe was created merely for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third-rate sun."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
Lord Dufferin to Alfred Tennyson [1858]:
'For the first 20 years of my life I not only did not care for poetry, but to the despair of my friends absolutely disliked it, at least so much of it as until that time had fallen in my way. In vain my mother read to me Dryden, Pope, Byron, Young, Cowper and all the standard classics of the day, each seemed to me as distasteful as I had from early infancy found Virgil, and I shall never forget her dismay when at a literary dinner I was cross-examined as to my tastes, and blushingly confessed before an Olympus of poets that I rather disliked poetry than otherwise.
'Soon afterwards I fell in with a volume of yours, and suddenly felt such a sensation of delight as I never experienced before. A new world seemed to open to me, and from that day, by a constant study of your works, I gradually worked my way to a gradual appreciation of what is good in all kinds of authors.'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood Print: Book
From Emily Tennyson's journal, 18 May 1867:
'He [Tennyson] read the new version of one of the "Window Songs," "Take my Love"; Heine's "Songs"; and some of the Reign of Law. The chapter on "Law in Politics" was especially interesting to us. The quotations from A. expressed some of the deepest truths [...] With the boys he was reading Flodden Field, the Prometheus of Aeschylus, and the 1st Georgic.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson and sons (Hallam and Lionel) Print: Book
From Emily Tennyson's Journal, 1870:
'March 1st. Aldworth. Hallam read the 4th Aeneid with A.; they study Virgil together daily.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred and Hallam Tennyson Print: Book
From Hallam Tennyson's account of 'My Father's Illness [1888]':
'He read or had read to him at this time the following books or essays: Leaf's edition of the Iliad; the Iphigenia of Aulis, expressing "wonder at its modernness"; Matthew Arnold on Tolstoi; Fiske's Destiny of Man; Gibbon's History, especially praising the Fall of Constantinople; Keats [sic] poems; Wordsworth's "Recluse." Of this last he said: "I like the passages which have been published before, such as that about the dance of a flock of birds, driven by a thoughtless impulse [...]"
'He often looked at his Virgil, more than ever delighting in what he called "that splendid end of the second Georgic."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
John Wilson Croker to Mr Justice Jackson, 4 December 1856:
'I am pretty sure that the first eclogue and the first book of the Aeneid were all of Virgil that I
translated [while of school age]. Pope's Homer I had by heart. The old Lord Shannon had given
me one when my father once took me (aet. 10) to Castle Martyr. I dare say I knew of no
translation of Virgil, and, stimulated by the example of Mr. Pope, was resolved to fill up that
chasm in English literature.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: John Wilson Croker Print: Book
John Wilson Croker to Mr Justice Jackson, 4 December 1856:
'I am pretty sure that the first eclogue and the first book of the Aeneid were all of Virgil that I
translated [while of school age]. Pope's Homer I had by heart. The old Lord Shannon had given
me one when my father once took me (aet. 10) to Castle Martyr. I dare say I knew of no
translation of Virgil, and, stimulated by the example of Mr. Pope, was resolved to fill up that
chasm in English literature.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: John Wilson Croker Print: Book
The Earl of Lonsdale to John Wilson Croker, 4 September 1849:
'I am a [italics]worshipper[end italics] of Arthur Young's, and from me you will hear only his praises. I think him the most truthful writer and fuller of information upon any subject than any other author [...] He is the only man of eminence of my time that I unfortunately was not acquainted with; I did not then appreciate his merits. Since I have turned my attention to agriculture, I look upon him as the real source of information upon all matters [...] I have a duplicate of his works, one at Lowther and another in London, and some odd ones both at Barnes and Whitehaven. His agricultural tours in France and Italy I consider the only works that give an intelligible account of those countries.
'His tour in Ireland has given me the idea that his views of Ireland were nearer the truth than any other work. When I received your letter yesterday, I was just starting to make a journey with Mr. Parker to look at some land that he had recommended in his northern tour seventy years ago to be cultivated, and drained, and whch is now in the same state as it was at the time he wrote. We found it exactly as he described it [...] I have read everything as regards agriculture, from Xenophon and Virgil, to Mechi and Huxtable. There is everything in Arthur Young [...] His "Farmer's Calendar," which is for the management [of a farm] advising what to do each month by month, is the standard book of all farmers at present, and has gone through many editions. I have three different editions of it.'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Earl of Lonsdale Print: Book
Robert Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 24 May, 1796: 'The reliance that I can place on my own application renders me little anxious for the future — & for the present I can live like a silkworm by spinning my own brains. have I published too hastily? — remember that Virgil in the spirit of poetical prophecy gives to Fames the epithet of malesuada.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Southey Print: Book
'There are besides, Sir Adam Fergusson, Colin Mackenzie, James Hope, Dr. James Buchan, Claud Russell, and perhaps two or three more of and about the same time period. But
Rari apparent nantes in gurgite vasto.'
Unknown
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Walter Scott
'"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
From chapter entitled 'Madame d'Arblay':
'Whilst her mother read Pope's works and Pitt's AEneid with her eldest daughter Esther,
Fanny [Burney] sat by and listened, and learnt by heart the passages which her sister recited.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Esther Burney and daughter (also Esther) Print: Book
