'Percy Wall, jailed for defying draft notices in the First World War, was inspired in part by a copy of Queen Mab owned by his father, a Marxist railway worker. But neither father nor son applied ideological tests to literature. In the prison library - with some guidance from a fellow conscientious objector who happened to be an important publishing executive - Percy discovered Emerson, Macaulay, Bacon, Shakespeare and Lamb. It was their style rather than their politics he found liberating: from them "I learned self-expression and acquired or strengthened standards of literature".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Wall Print: Book
Byron's Ravenna Journal (4 January-27 February 1821), 5 January 1821: 'Ordered Fletcher (at four o'clock this afternoon) to copy out 7 or 8 apophthegms of Bacon, in which I have detected such blunders as a school-boy might detect rather than commit. Such are the sages! What must they be, when such as I can stumble on their mistakes or misstatements?'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon Lord Byron Manuscript: Unknown, Copied by William Fletcher (reader's valet).
Byron's Ravenna Journal (4 January-27 February 1821), 5 January 1821: 'Ordered Fletcher (at four o'clock this afternoon) to copy out 7 or 8 apophthegms of Bacon, in whiich I have detected such blunders as a school-boy might detect rather than commit. Such are the sages! What must they be, when such as I can stumble on their mistakes or misstatements?'
Unknown
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Fletcher
Byron's Ravenna Journal (4 January-27 February 1821), 6 January 1821: 'Read Spence's Anecdotes ... Corrected blunders in nine apophthegms of Bacon -- all historical -- and read Mitford's Greece.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon Lord Byron Manuscript: Unknown, Copied by William Fletcher (reader's valet).
'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
William Blake, in copy of Francis Bacon, Essays: "'Villain! Did Christ seek the Praise of the Rulers?'"
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Blake Print: Book
William Blake, in copy of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Works (1798) vol I: " '... I read Burkes Treatise [on the Sublime and Beautiful] when very Young at the same time I read Locke on Human Understanding & Bacons Advancmt [sic] of Learning on Every one of these Books I wrote my Opinions & on looking them over find that my Notes on Reynolds in this Book are exactly Similar. I felt the Same Comtempt & Abhorrence then; that I do now.'"
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Blake Print: Book
'After the breakdown of her marriage in 1752, Sarah Scott read voraciously and eclectically, the "history of Florence" and Lord Bacon's essays, and the Old Plays, Christianity not founded on argument, Randolph's answer to it... and some of David's Simple Life... an account of the Government of Venice, Montaigne's Essays.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Scott Print: Book
'Read Bacons essay on the idea of compleat garden divided into every month of the year [...] What beautiful essays these are.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Clare Print: Book
Sir John Hammerton looking back on his early days in Glasgow when he left school and became a correspondence clerk, he said of Cassell's Library "What an Aladdin's cave it proved to me! Addison, Goldsmith, Bacon, Steele, DeQuincey ..., Charles Lamb. Macaulay and many scores of others whom old Professor Morley introduced to me -- what a joy of life I obtained from these, and how greatly they made life worth living!"
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Sir John Hammerton Print: Book
'And in the garden reading "Faber fortunae" with great pleasure. So home to bed.'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Pepys Print: Book
'Up and to my office; and then walked to Woolwich, reading Bacon's "faber Fortune", which the oftener I read the more I admire.'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Pepys Print: Book
'and so after dinner, by water home, all the way going and coming reading "Faber fortunae", which I can never read too often.'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Pepys Print: Book
'I have read thro' that clear & candid but cold hearted narration of David Hume - and now seven of Toby Smollet[t]'s eight chaotic volumes are before me. To say nothing of Gibbon (of whom I have only read a volume) - nor of the Watsons the Russel[l]s the Voltaires &c &c known to me only by name. Alas! thou seest how I am beset. - It would be of little avail to criticise Bacons "Essays": it is enough to say, that Stewarts opinion of them is higher than I can attain. For style, they are rich & venerable - for thinking, incorrect & fanciful.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle Print: Book
'Dipped into Bacon's "Essays"; so pregnant with just, original, and striking observations on every topic which is touched, that I cannot select what pleases me most...'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Green Print: Book
'Finished Lord Bacon's Letters, edited by Birch. It is grievous to see this great man, who appears from various passages fully sensible of his vast powers and attainments, and impressed with a just confidence of the weight he would have with posterity, eternally cringing...'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Green Print: Book
"Consider what Lord Bacon says: 'Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged...See Advancement of Learning, Part 2, P.47 of first Edition".
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: William Blake Print: Book
[italics]'S. Livy p.532 - Cumis, (adeo minimis etiam rebum prava religio inserit Deos) mures in aede Jovis aurum rosisse 556. 2 vol. Maie says that if we had met the Emperor Julian in private life he would have appeared a very ordinary man The fables of Aesop in Greek. - Boethius consolation of philosophy - how in the reign of Theodoric [underlined] a Christian? [end underlining] gr - Lord Bacon's works - Gibbon likes Boethius - [end italics] Mary reads Gibbon (100).'
[italic text is by PBS, non-italic by MG]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
"Bacon & Newton would prescribe ways of making the world heavier to me, & Pitt would prescribe distress for a Medical potion;" in same letter he talks about Mr Hayley's library being nearly finished. Letter to Thomas Butts. Letter 31. 11th September 1801.
Unknown
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Blake
[Percy Shelley's Reading List for 1815, compiled by Mary Shelley. Only texts not referred to in journal entries are given separate database entries here]
'Pastor Fido
Orlando Furioso
Livy's History
Seneca's Works
Tasso's Girusalame Liberata
Tassos Aminta
2 vols of Plutarch in Italian
Some of the plays of Euripedes
Seneca's Tragedies
Reveries of Rousseau
Hesiod
Novum Organum
Alfieri's Tragedies
Theocritus
Ossian
Herodotus
Thucydides
Homer
Locke on the Human Understanding
Conspiration de Rienzi
History of arianism
Ochley's History of the Saracens
Mad. de Stael sur la literature'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'Thence to walk all alone in the fields behind Grays Inne, making an end of reading over my dear "Faber Fortunae" of my Lord Bacon's'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Pepys Print: Book
'and so to Deptford to enquire after a little business there; and thence by water back again, all the way coming and going reading my Lord Bacon's "Faber Fortunae", which I can never read too often.'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Pepys Print: Book
'and so away home by water, with more and more pleasure every time, I reading over my Lord Bacon's "Faber Fortunae".'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Pepys Print: Book
'I have read since last October a good deal of the history relating to the East ... : not much of books not connected with India. ... ; I also read all Bacon's "Essays" ...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mountstuart Elphinstone Print: Book
'So home to dinner, and to discourse with my brother upon his translation of my Lord Bacon's "Faber Fortunae" which I gave him to do; and he hath done it but meanly, I am not pleased with it at all - having done it only literally, but without any life at all.'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: John Pepys Print: Book
'Read Homer & Virgil - And Bacon's Natural Hist. & Apothegms.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
'Read Homer & Virgil - And Bacon's Natural Hist. & Apothegms.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
'He [Johnson] told me that Bacon was a favourite authour with him; but he had never read his works till he was compiling the "English Dictionary", in which, he said, I might see Bacon very often quoted.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Johnson Print: Book
Included in Reading Notes of Edward Pordage (c.1710):
Notes on memory from Francis Bacon's Of the proficience and advancement of learning
(1605).
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Pordage Print: Book
