'I have cast up my reading account, and brought it to the end of the year 1835. [?] During the last thirteen months I have read Aeschylus twice; Sophocles twice; Euripides once; Pindar twice; Callimachus; Apollonius Rhodius; Quintus Calaber; Theocritus twice; Herodotus; Thucydides; almost all Xenophon?s works; almost all Plato; Aristotle?s Politics, and a good deal of his Organon, besides dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch?s Lives; about half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; Plautus twice; Terence twice; Lucretius twice; Catullus; Tibullus; Propertius; Lucan; Statius; Silius Italicus; Livy; Velleius Paterculus; Sallust; Caesar; and, lastly, Cicero. I have, indeed, still a little of Cicero left; but I shall finish him in a few days. I am now deep in Aristophanes and Lucian.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Babington Macaulay Print: Book
'While he read little but the Bible and religious periodicals, his son was working his way through the Rhymney Workmen's Institute Library and Cassell's National Library of 3d paperbacks. MacAulay's essays, Goldsmith's History of England, Far from the Madding Crowd, Self-Help, Josephus, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Pepys, Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and The Sorrows of Young Werther were among the books Jones read, often on his employer's time. (He hid them under the ledger at the Rhymney Iron Works, where he worked a thirteen hour day as a timekeeper for 9s. a week.)'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Jones Print: Book
'I have read only one play, the Bashful Lover and one or two of Plutarch's lives since we wrote last.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Print: Book
'[Janet Hamilton] had a heavy literary diet as a child - history by Rollin and Plutarch, Ancient Universal History, Pitscottie's Chronicles of Scotland, as well as the Spectator and Rambler. She could borrow books by Burns, Robert Fergusson and other poets from neighbours, and at age eight she found "to my great joy, on the loom of an intellectual weaver", Paradise Lost and Allan Ramsay's poems'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Janet Hamilton Print: Book
'The books which I am at present employed in reading to myself are in English, Plutarch's Lives and Milner's Ecclesiastical History'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Babington Macaulay Print: Book
'In her teens [Frances] Burney was tackling on her own such works as Plutarch's "Lives" (in translation), Pope's "Iliad", and ... all the works of Pope, including the Letters; Hume's "History of England"; Hooke's "Roman History"; and Conyers Middleton's "Life of Cicero" ... She also ... studied music theory in Diderot's treatise ...'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Frances Burney Print: Book
'Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called "intellectual manna"... Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll's secularist propaganda, Emerson's "Self- Reliance" ("I felt I had been handed a golden birthright"), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch's Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud's "Psychoneurosis", Lafcadio Hearn's "Life and Literature", and Henri Bergson - his essay on laughter, of course... Chaplin also spent forty years reading (if not finishing) the three volumes of "The World as Will and Idea" by Schopenhauer, whose musings on suicide are echoed in Monsieur Verdoux'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Spencer Chaplin Print: Book
'I was but about twenty-two years of age when I first began to read them, and I assure you, my friend, that they made a very deep and lasting impression in my mind. By reading them [Plato's On the Immortality of the soul and Plutarch's Morals and Confucio's texts] I was taught to bear the unavoidable evils attending humanity, and to supply all my wants by contracting or restraining my desires.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: James Lackington Print: Book
'Much of it [ie. ?the daily instruction I received?] consisted in the books I read by myself, and my father?s discourses to me, chiefly during our walks. From 1810 to the end of 1813 we were living in Newington Green, then an almost rustic neighbourhood. My father?s health required considerable and constant exercise, and he walked habitually before breakfast, generally in the green lanes towards Hornsey. In these walks I always accompanied him, and with my earliest recollections of green fields and wild flowers, is mingled that of the account I gave him daily of what I had read the day before. To the best of my remembrance, this was a voluntary rather than a prescribed exercise. I made notes on slips of paper while reading, and from these, in the morning walks, I told the story to him; for the books were chiefly histories, of which I read in this manner a great number: Robertson?s histories, Hume, Gibbon; but my greatest delight, then and for long afterwards, was Watson?s Philip the Second and Third. The heroic defence of the Knights of Malta against the Turks, and of the revolted provinces of the Netherlands against Spain, excited in me an intense and lasting interest. Next to Watson, my favourite historical reading was Hooke?s History of Rome. Of Greece I had seen at that time no regular history, except school abridgments and the last two or three volumes of a translation of Rollin?s Ancient History, beginning with Philip of Macedon. But I read with great delight Langhorne?s translation of Plutarch. In English history, beyond the time at which Hume leaves off, I remember reading Burnett?s History of his Own Time, though I cared little for anything in it except the wars and battles; and the historical part of the Annual Register, from the beginning to about 1788, where the volumes my father borrowed for me from Mr Bentham left off?. In these frequent talks about the books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give me explanations and ideas respecting civilization, government, morality, mental cultivation, which he required me afterwards to restate to him in my own words.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Stuart Mill Print: Book
'Read "Edinburgh Review"; afterwards, for first time, after I know not what interval, a little Greek, viz. Plut. "Phocian" the same [...] as reccomended so many years ago by Fox and which put me first on reading "Plutarch's Lives"'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Windham Print: Book
[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
'Shelley reads Plutarch in Greek - Lord B - comes down & stays here an hour - I read a novel in the evening'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'write - read Locke and Curt. S. reads Plutarch and Locke. He reads Paradise Lost - aloud in the evening'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'Shelley reads Curt - & Plutarch - read Pamela and Shelley read[s] Gibbon after tea'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'In the evening I finish Curtius. S. reads & finishes Plutarchs life of Alexander. After tea S. reads the XXth chapter of Gibbon to me'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'Read Tacitus and Buffon. S. reads Homer and Plutarch'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'S. reads Homer's Hymns'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'S read Plutarch's lives.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'S. reads Plutarchs life of Marius'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'Write - read Lucan & the Bible S. writes the Cenci & reads Plutarch's lives - the Gisbornes call in the evening - S. reads Paradise Lost to me - Read 2 Cantos of the Purgatorio'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'You talk of reading "a very old book": Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides. Why that's a [underlined] chickn [sic, underlined] compared to my present reading. I am reduced to a perusal of my own little library, and am solacing myself with Plutarch's Lives, and Robertson's History of Charles V. and vary my sport occasionally with an Historical Play of Shakespear, or a good Sunday Book.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Harriet Burney Print: Book
'I return your Italian volumes, my dear friend, with many thanks, owning honestly, that I have never looked into them; for the thread of my interest in Botta's History having been interrupted by my leaving Florence, I could not for the life of me connect it again; and I got hold of other books - read no Italian for ages - and, at last, pounced one fine day upon a good, clear edition of Ariosto, and have been and am reading him with even more delight than when he first fell into my hands. Here and there, he is a bad boy, and as the book is my own, & I do not like indecency, I cut out whole pages that annoy me, & burn them before the Author's face, which stands at the beginning of the first volume, and I hope feels properly ashamed. Next to Ariosto, by way of something new, I treat myself now and then with a play of one Wm Shakespear, and I am reading Robertson's Charles Vth which comes in well after that part of Botta's History at which I left off - viz: just about the time of the council of Trent. And, as I love modern reading, I was glad to find myself possessed of a very tidy edition of a Biographical work you may perhaps have heard tell of - Plutarch's Lives. If you should ever meet with it, I think I might venture to say you would not dislike it'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Harriet Burney Print: Book
[List of books read to Sir Thomas Browne by Elizabeth Lyttelton]. Headed in commonplace book: 'The books which my daughter Elizabeth hath read unto me at nights till she read ym all out'. The books are: 'all Plutarch's Lives, folio; all the Turkish historie, folio ; all the three added of ye Turkish emperours by Rycaut, fol.; all Rycaut's books of ye Turks, fol; all Baker's Cronicle of England, fol; all ye history of China by Semedo, fol; all the history of Josephus, fol; all fox his book of Martyrs, fol; all the Travills of Olearius & Mandelilo, fol; all the Travells of Taverniere, fol; all the Travells of Petrus della valle, fol; all the Travells of Vincent Le Blanck, fol; all the Travells of Pinto, fol; all the Travells of Gage, fol; the Travells of Terre, octavo; all the Historie of the life of Monsieur d' Espernoon, fol; all the historie of naples, fol; all the historie of Venice, fol; all the historie of Queen Elizabeth by Camden, fol; all the history of Herodian, fol; all the history of Procopius, fol; all Sands his Travells, fol; all Olaus Magnus of the Northern Countrys, fol; all Camerarius his observations, fol; all Suetonius of the Twelve Caesars, fol; all appians warrs, fol; all Speed's Cronicle to the life of King James, fol; So some parts of Purchas his Relations; some hundreds of Sermons. Many other Books, Treatises, discourses of severall Kinds, which may amount unto halfe the quantety of halfe the books in folio, which are before set down.'
Century: 1600-1699 / 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Lyttelton Print: Book