Son of British Prime Minister Robert Walpole, Horace Walpole was a prolific letter writer, memoirist, poet, dramatist, novelist, antiquarian, and critic. He is best known for inaugurating the Gothic novel with The Castle of Otranto (1764), a tale of aristocratic decadence, incest, and the supernatural. He privately printed and circulated among his acquaintances copies of a second gothic work, The Mysterious Mother (1768), this time a blank verse tragedy on the theme of Catholicism and incest.

Poet and notable legislator, Waller authored a variety of coterie verse, including "The Story of Phoebus and Daphne, Applied" (1645).

Leader in the Wars of Scottish Independence, Wallace became Scotland's greatest national hero and the subject for several literary works as well as the film biography Braveheart.

German writer who often published under the pseudonym Viet Weber. Among other works published under that name, he published Teufelsbeschwörung, which was translated into English as The Sorcerer and published in 1795 by Joseph Johnson.

Author of the Brut d'Angleterre (Le Roman de Brut, 1155).

French author of a voluminous body of poetry, criticism, history, and drama, Voltaire was probably best known for his comic yet philosophical fiction. Among his most notable works, his first dramatic tragedy, Oedipe (1718), was a tremendous success. His epic poem La Henriade (1723) celebrates the life of Henry IV of France. Zaire (1732) is a tragic love drama. Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733) offers a comparison between England and France that is favorable to England particularly for its religious tolerance.

French court and occasional poet, Voiture was admired for the letters and poems he circulated among a fashionable literary coterie.

Notable lawyer and professor of law at Heidelberg University and Leyden University.

The Visconti family ruled Milan from the late thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century.

Roman poet whose rich and complex Eclogues (c. 37 B.C.) and Georgics (29 B.C.) provided the model for poetry about rural life to subsequent ages. His Aeneid (written c. 29-19 B.C.), an epic poem on the founding of the city of Rome that centers on the story of the hero Aeneas, was incomplete at the time of his death.