This edition, 1866 (!) is a volume that contains 'views of the characters of the world's greatest men...and to present these views in thebest words of the best authors.' One can only imagine how differently some of the greats herein may be viewed today, over a century later; would Lorenzo de Medici, for instance, be remembered as a patron of the arts or as a member of a family of notorious poisoners? In this compendium: Kings and Conquerors: Alexander the Great, Grote; Julius Caesar, de Quincey; Mahomet, Gibbon; Charlemagne, Hallam; Alfred, Hume; William the Conqueror, Lyttleton; Wallace and Robert Bruce, Tytler; Peter the Great and Charles XII, Voltaire; Charles V, Robertson; Henry VIII, Froude; Oliver Cromwell, Carlyle; Lord Clive, Macauley; Washington and Napoleon Buonaparte, Brougham; Nelson, Alison and Lamartine; Sir John Moore, Napier; Wellington, Hugh Miller. Statesmen and Orators: Cicero, Professor Spaulding; Lorenzo de Medici, Hallam; Machiavelli, Sismondi; CardinalWolsey, Sir Thomas More and Sir Walter Raleigh, Tytler; Thomas Cromwell, Froude; Hampden, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham,Warren Hastings and William Pitt, Macauley; Viscount Falkland, Clarendon; Burke and Charles Fox, Alison; Talleyrand, Brougham; Mirabeau and Robespierre, George Gilfillan; Palmerston, Blackwood. Philosophers And Men Of Science: Socrates, Grote; Plato, Brucker; Aristotle, Blucher; Copernicus and Kepler, Olmstead; Lord Bacon and Byron, Macauley; Galileo, Sir David Brewster; Descartes and Locke, Hallam; Sir Isaac Newtown, Voltaire; Leibnitz and Berkeley, Dugald Stewart; Benjamin Franklin and James Watt, Jeffrey; La Place, Playfair. Poets and Dramatists: Homer, Pope; Virgil and Petrarch, Professor Spaulding; Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Lope de Vega and Alfieri, Sismondi; Chaucer, Spenser and Thomas Moore, Hazlitt; Shakespeare, Dryden-Blair; Ben Jonson, Dryden; Calderon, Augustus W. Schlegel; Cornielle, Moliére and Racine, Hallam; Milton, Congreve and Thomson, Johnson; Pope, Wordsworth and Shelley, de Quincey; Cowper, Jeffrey; Chatterton, Thomas Campbell; Burns, Carlyle; Coleridge, Foster. Historians, Novelists and Essayists:Boccaccio and Cervantes, Sismondi; Rabelais and Voltaire, Hazlitt; Montaigne and Pascal, Hallam; Swift, Jeffery; Addison, Johnson; Samuel Johnson, Sir J. Mackintosh; David Hume, Professor Nichol; Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, John Paul Miller and Sir Walter Scott, Carlyle; Goldsmith, Johnstone; Gibbon, Prescott; DeFoe, Hugh Miller; Macaulay, George Gilfillan; Thackery, Hannay.