English peer and politician who served as Lord High Steward at King George I's coronation, Privy Counsellor (1715), Knight of the Garter (1721), Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1720-1724), and Lord Chamberlain (1724-1757).

Mme de Grafigny's novel Lettres d'une Péruviennes (1747) tells the story of Zilia, an Incan princess captured by the Spanish.

An English poet, contemporary of William Langland and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works, the Mirour de l'Omme (c. 1376-1379), Vox Clamantis (c. 1377-1381), and Confessio Amantis (c. 1390-1392), three long poems written in French, Latin, and English respectively, which are united by common moral and political themes.

Judge of the king's bench and maternal grandfather to the novelist Henry Fielding.

neé Elizabeth Midwinter, she married bookseller and banker Sir Francis Gosling (Gosling, Francis, Sir, d. 1768 ).

A surgeon at the University of Glasgow and mentor to Tobias Smollett and Dr. John Moore. H.L. Fulton writes, " was apprenticed to William Stirling and John Gordon, surgeons in a large practice and formerly masters to Moore's distant cousin Tobias Smollett." (Fulton, H.L. "Moore, John (1729-1802)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Vol. 38. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 970.)

Spanish general and statesman whose military brilliance earned him the title "The Great Captain." His most famous military campaigns included the Italian Wars and the Conquest of Granada.

Goldsmith is often regarded as the epitome of a grub street writer, living much of his life in poverty and debt despite authoring a massive body of histories, biographies, plays, poems, novels, and literary criticism. Goldsmith's authorial importance was acknowledged by the literary community with his poems The Traveller (1764) and The Hermit (1765), but later texts would give him fame. Satirical and paradoxical, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) was his most popular novel.

A prolific Italian playwright known for his innovations in the dramatic form commedia dell'arte who also introduced elements of realism into dramatic characterizations to help reform the Italian stage. Among his extensive list of dramatic works, his stage adaptations of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740-1) include Pamela Nubile (1750) and Pamela Maritata (1759).

Goethe anonymously published Die Leiden des jungen Werthers in 1774 (translated as The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779). The eponymous hero eventually commits suicide over a hopeless passion for a woman engaged to another. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1796) was translated as Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Thomas Carlyle in 1824. Goethe was eminent as a poet and dramatist as well, with the two part verse drama Faust (1808 and 1832) as the foremost of his works.