William Alexander

c. 1567 – 12 February 1640 (~73)

1 live poem · English

William Alexander, later the first Earl of Stirling, was born about 1567 at Menstrie in Clackmannanshire, near Stirling, Scotland, and died in London on 12 February 1640. He belonged to that distinctive early Stuart class of men for whom poetry, government service, courtly advancement, religious reflection, and colonial ambition were not separate callings but overlapping forms of public life. In his own century he wa…

“After a great Travel both of Body and of Mind, which (since not voluntary but imposed upon me) was the more painful, by retiring for a Time where I was born being curious, as the most dainty Kind of Pleasure for such as are capable of their Delicacies to recreate myself with the Muses,—I may justly say recreate, since they create new Spirits I conversed with some of the Modern as well as with the Ancients, kindling my Fire at those Fires which do still burn out of the Ashes of ancient Authors.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay

25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859 (~59)

1 live poem · English

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born on 25 October 1800 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire and died on 28 December 1859 at Kensington, London. He was at once a poet, essayist, parliamentarian, colonial administrator, historian, reviewer, and one of the most commanding prose stylists in nineteenth-century English. To modern readers his name often summons the grand certainty of Victorian “Whig history,” the tendency to…

“An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.”