Poet, courtier, favorite of Henry VIII, and friend of Sir Thomas Wyatt.

A notable orator and high-ranking Roman politician, Brutus became a leader in the successful assassination plot against Julius Caesar after Caesar declared his divinity and named himself permanent dictator.

French Jesuit historian, classicist, and man of letters. His analyses of Greek dramas in Le Théâtre des Grecs (1730) were especially esteemed.

A Scottish explorer who discovered the source of the Blue Nile in 1770. His five volume Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile, in the Years 1768–73 was published in 1790.

As one of the most accomplished poets of nineteenth-century Britain, Elizabeth Barrett was proposed as a possible successor to William Wordsworth as poet laureate. Barrett enjoyed a physically active and intellectually vigorous childhood.

An English pastoral poet with an acute eye for nature, known for his long poem Britannia's Pastorals, two parts published in 1613 and 1616, with a third unfinished part printed posthumously in 1832 (1613-16). Two of his poems appeared as well in The Shepheard's Pipe, a collection of ecologues by various authors.

John Brown was an English priest, playwright, and essayist. One of his notable plays is Barbarossa (1754), a tragedy about the notorious 15th and 16th century pirate Anuj Barbarossa.

As the first professional American author, Brown was known for his Gothic novels, especially Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799), Ormond (1799), Edgar Huntly (1799), and Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist (1803–1805). Brown edited or operated a number of periodicals during his life, including the Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1799-1800), renamed the American Review, and Literary Journal (1801-1802); the Literary Magazine, and American Register (1803-1807); and the American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Science (1807-1809).

Irish author Henry Brooke published poems, opera, political polemics, novels, and plays. Among his most important works, The Fool of Quality (1765-70) and Juliet Grenville; or, The History of the Human Heart (1774), both novels of sensibility, mix that genre with exposition of political principles. Though his first and best-remembered play Gustavus Vasa, the Deliverer of His Country (1739) was banned from the stage because of its applicability to English politics in its time, he continued to write several other dramas with provocative political content.

Brooke began her literary career with The Old Maid (1755-6), a witty essay periodical that she operated under the pseudonym "Mary Singleton, Spinster," and that was reprinted as a single volume in 1764. This periodical staging interactions between a vivid central voice, the perspectives of other contributors (probably fictional), and reader correspondence (much of which may also have been fictional), it is no surprise that her first full-length literary effort was a drama, Virginia: A Tragedy (1756), which she was unable to get staged.