Isidore-Auguste-Marie-François-Xavier Comte, known as Auguste Comte, was a French philosopher, writer, and mathematician who founded the school of positivism and established sociology as a field of study.

Italian Renaissance poet particularly esteemed for her love poems to her husband, Ferrante d'Avalos, Marquis of Pescara, who died from war wounds.

Italian noble and condottiero (captain of a mercenary company) serving Spain and the Papal States during the Italian wars.

Following in his father's footsteps as an actor, manager, and comic playwright, Colman the Younger also authored a enormous body of work that includes as some of its most substantial pieces Inkle and Yarico (1787), The Iron Chest 1796), The Heir-at-Law (1797), and John Bull (1803). He succeeded his father as manager of the Haymarket Theatre, filling that role from 1794 to 1817.

This playwright, theater manager, and close friend to actor David Garrick was also known as a generous mentor in the eighteenth century theatrical world. Among the most popular of his many works figure The Clandestine Marriage (1766), Polly Honeycombe (1760), and The Jealous Wife (1761). Colman the Elder managed the Haymarket Theatre from 1776 to 1794.

English novelist, trained lawyer, and father of the first English detective novels. Of his more than 30 novels, various short stories, travel literature, and plays, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) are the most well-known because of their contributions to the genre of detective fiction. He was also friends with Charles Dickens, whose periodical Household Words published many of Collins’ novels.

A popular English landscape and portrait painter who excelled in art from an early age, Collins exhibited and sold his work consistently between 1809 and his death. Collins was especially recognized for his picturesque landscapes and rustic scenes of rural life. His painting "The Sale of the Pet Lamb" brought his name to the forefront in 1812, but he earned his admission as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1814 on the merit of two other paintings, "The Blackberry Gatherers" and "The Birdcatchers." He is also the father of novelist Wilkie Collins.

Producing only a relatively small body of work and plagued by mental illness during his later life, Collins was nevertheless one of the most influential poets of the pre-Romantic later eighteenth century. As portrayed in his odes, his conception of poetry as visionary, even prophetic, inspired many of his immediate successors.

English theatre critic, theologian, and leading non-juror bishop (clergy who refused to pledge allegiance to the new monarchs William III and Mary II following the deposition of James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688). Collier is most remembered for his 1698 anti-theatre pamphlet, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. This pamphlet attacks significant playwrights such as John Dryden, John Vanbrugh, William Congreve, and William Wycherley.

Author of the humorous An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) and collaborator with Sarah Fielding on The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754); with her sister Margaret (Collier, Margaret, 1719-1794 ), one of the Miss Colliers that Anna Letitia Barbauld refers to in her biography of Samuel Richardson.