The Traveller (poem)
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The Traveller (poem)
''The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society'' (1764) is a philosophical poem by Oliver Goldsmith. In heroic verse of an Augustan style it discusses the causes of happiness and unhappiness in nations. It was the work which first made Goldsmith's name, and is still considered a classic of mid-18th-century poetry. Synopsis The dedication to ''The Traveller'' sets out Goldsmith's purpose: I have endeavoured to shew, that there may be equal happiness in states, that are differently governed from our own; that every state has a particular principle of happiness, and that this principle in each may be carried to a mischievous excess. He begins the poem by extolling the happiness of his brother Henry's simple family life. Then, from a vantage-point in the Alps, he surveys the condition of the world. Every nation, he says, considers itself the happiest, but this is only because each nation judges by its own standards. In fact, happiness is probably equally spread, though in different ...
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The Traveller Book Cover
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with pronouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of pronoun ''thee'') when followed by a ...
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Montesquieu
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (; ; 18 January 168910 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, historian, and political philosopher. He is the principal source of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He is also known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word ''despotism'' in the political lexicon.. His anonymously published ''The Spirit of Law'' (1748), which was received well in both Great Britain and the American colonies, influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States in drafting the U.S. Constitution. Biography Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in southwest France, south of Bordeaux. His father, Jacques de Secondat (1654–1713), was a soldier with a long noble ancestry, including descent from Richard de la Pole, Yorkist claimant to the English crown. His mother, Marie ...
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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, (; 25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as the Paymaster-General between 1846 and 1848. Macaulay's '' The History of England'', which expressed his contention of the superiority of the Western European culture and of the inevitability of its sociopolitical progress, is a seminal example of Whig history that remains commended for its prose style. Early life Macaulay was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire on 25 October 1800, the son of Zachary Macaulay, a Scottish Highlander, who became a colonial governor and abolitionist, and Selina Mills of Bristol, a former pupil of Hannah More. They named their first child after his uncle Thomas Babington, a Leicestershire landowner and politician, who had married Zachary's sister Jean. The young Macaulay was noted as a child prodigy; as a toddler, gazing out of the window f ...
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Henry George Bohn
Henry George Bohn (4 January 179622 August 1884) was a British publisher. He is principally remembered for the ''Bohn's Libraries'' which he inaugurated. These were begun in 1846, targeted the mass market, and comprised editions of standard works and translations, dealing with history, science, classics, theology and archaeology. Biography Bohn was born in London. He was the son of a German bookbinder who had settled in England. In 1831 he began his career as a dealer in rare books and remainders. In 1841 he issued his ''"Guinea" Catalogue'' of books, a monumental work containing 23,208 items. Bohn was noted for his book auction sales: one held in 1848 lasted four days, the catalogue comprising twenty folio pages. Printed on this catalogue was the information: "Dinner at 2 o'clock, dessert at 4, tea at 5, and supper at 10." In 1846, he also started publishing ''The British florist : or lady's journal of horticulture'', which had 6 volumes with illustrations and plates (coloured) ...
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Interpolation (manuscripts)
An interpolation, in relation to literature and especially ancient manuscripts, is an entry or passage in a text that was not written by the original author. As there are often several generations of copies between an extant copy of an ancient text and the original, each handwritten by different scribes, there is a natural tendency for extraneous material to be inserted into such documents over time. Overview Interpolations originally may be inserted as an authentic explanatory note (for example, ), but may also be included for fraudulent purposes. The forged passages and works attributed to the Pseudo-Isidore are an example of the latter. Similarly, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch were interpolated by Apollinarian heretics, three centuries after the originals were written. Charters and legal texts are also subject to forgery of this kind. In the 13th century a medieval romance, the Prose ''Tristan'', inserted another prose romance, the Vulgate ''Queste del Saint Graal'', i ...
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Leigh Hunt
James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 178428 August 1859), best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet. Hunt co-founded '' The Examiner'', a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles. He was the centre of the Hampstead-based group that included William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, known as the "Hunt circle". Hunt also introduced John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson to the public. Hunt's presence at Shelley's funeral on the beach near Viareggio was immortalised in the painting by Louis Édouard Fournier. Hunt inspired aspects of the Harold Skimpole character in Charles Dickens' novel ''Bleak House''. Early life James Henry Leigh Hunt was born 19 October 1784, at Southgate, London, where his parents had settled after leaving the United States. His father, Isaac, a lawyer from Philadelphia, and his mother, Mary Shewell, a merchant's daughter and a devout Quaker, had been forced to come to Britain because ...
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Thomas Campbell (poet)
Thomas Campbell (27 July 177715 June 1844) was a Scottish poet. He was a founder and the first President of the Clarence Club and a co-founder of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland; he was also one of the initiators of a plan to found what became University College London. In 1799 he wrote "The Pleasures of Hope", a traditional 18th-century didacticism, didactic poem in heroic couplets. He also produced several patriotic war songs—"Ye Mariners of England", "The Soldier's Dream", "Hohenlinden" and, in 1801, "Battle of the Baltic (poem), The Battle of the Baltic", but was no less at home in delicate lyrics such as "At Love's Beginning". Early life Born on High Street, Glasgow in 1777, he was the youngest of the eleven children of Alexander Campbell (1710–1801), son of the 6th and last Laird of Kirnan, Argyll, descended from the Clan MacIver, MacIver-Campbells. His mother, Margaret (born 1736), was the daughter of John Campbell of Craignish and Mary, daughter of ...
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Samuel Egerton Brydges
Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, 1st Baronet (30 November 1762 – 8 September 1837) was an English bibliographer and genealogist. He was also Member of Parliament for Maidstone from 1812 to 1818. Educated at Maidstone Grammar School and The King's School, Canterbury, Brydges was admitted to Queens' College, Cambridge in 1780, though he did not take a degree. He was called to the bar from the Middle Temple in 1787. He wrote some novels and poems, now forgotten, but rendered valuable service through his bibliographical publications (printed at the Lee Priory Press), ''Censura Literaria, Titles and Opinions of Old English Books'' (10 vols. 1805–9), his editions of Edward Phillips's ''Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum'' (1800), Arthur Collins's ''Peerage of England'' (1812), and of many rare Elizabethan authors. He was a founding member of the Roxburghe Club, a publishing club of wealthy bibliophiles. He was elected a Knight Grand Commander of the Equestrian, Secular, and Chapterial ...
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William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth's ''magnum opus'' is generally considered to be ''The Prelude'', a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850. Early life The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in what is now named Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, (now in Cumbria), part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. William's sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he wa ...
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Charles James Fox
Charles James Fox (24 January 1749 – 13 September 1806), styled ''The Honourable'' from 1762, was a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spanned 38 years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was the arch-rival of the Tory politician William Pitt the Younger; his father Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, a leading Whig of his day, had similarly been the great rival of Pitt's famous father, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham ("Pitt the Elder"). Fox rose to prominence in the House of Commons as a forceful and eloquent speaker with a notorious and colourful private life, though at that time with rather conservative and conventional opinions. However, with the coming of the American War of Independence and the influence of the Whig Edmund Burke, Fox's opinions evolved into some of the most radical to be aired in the British Parliament of his era. Fox became a prominent and staunch opponent of King George III, whom he regarded as an aspiring tyrant. He ...
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Tory (British Political Party)
A Tory () is a person who holds a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalism and conservatism, which upholds the supremacy of social order as it has evolved in the English culture throughout history. The Tory ethos has been summed up with the phrase "God, King, and Country". Tories are monarchists, were historically of a high church Anglican religious heritage, and opposed to the liberalism of the Whig faction. The philosophy originates from the Cavalier faction, a royalist group during the English Civil War. The Tories political faction that emerged in 1681 was a reaction to the Whig-controlled Parliaments that succeeded the Cavalier Parliament. As a political term, Tory was an insult derived from the Irish language, that later entered English politics during the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–1681. It also has exponents in other parts of the former British Empire, such as the Loyalists of British America, who opposed US secession duri ...
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Monthly Review (London)
''The Monthly Review'' (1749–1845) was an English periodical founded by Ralph Griffiths, a Nonconformist bookseller. The first periodical in England to offer reviews, it featured the novelist and poet Oliver Goldsmith as an early contributor. Griffiths himself, and likely his wife Isabella Griffiths, contributed review articles to the periodical. Later contributors included Dr. Charles Burney, John Cleland, Theophilus Cibber, James Grainger, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Moody, and Tobias Smollett—who would go on to establish the ''Monthly'''s competitor in 1756, ''The Critical Review''. William Kenrick, the "superlative scoundrel", was editor from 1759 to 1766. Publishing history of the ''Monthly Review'' *Volumes 1–81, May 1749–Dec. 1789; * v. 1–108, Jan. 1790–Nov. 1825; *new ser., v. 1–15, Jan. 1826–Dec. 1830; *new ser., v. 1–45, Jan. 1831–Dec. 1844. (The 4-month volumes in this series are numbered I, II, and III on the title page, restarting at I e ...
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