Some lesser known facts about books and bookmen. Extracted from The Howlers Omnibus (1928)

Pope poet

 

Alexander Pope

Pope wrote principally in heroic cutlets. (pic above)

 

Robert Burns

Robert Burns, in 1787, became literally a lion.

 

John Wycliffe

John Wycliffe was the editor of the Morning Star, but afterwards became a reformer.

 

Francis Bacon

Bacon was the man who thought he wrote Shakespeare.

 

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tennyson, the greatest prose writer who ever lived, wrote the “Iliad” and “Paradise Lost”.

 

George Bernard Shaw

Mr George Bernard Shaw is the famous actor and comedian.

 

Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott wrote “ Quentin Durwood, “ Ivanhoe” and “Emulsion “.

 

Sir Walter Scott

Walter Scott was imprisoned in the Tower because he could not pay his debts. While there he wrote the Waverley Novels, but he was afterwards burnt alive. He also brought tobacco from Virginia, so called after his beloved mistress Queen Elizabeth.

 

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who it seems, lived up to her name, and had her own way and gave Shakespeare a hot time of it.

 

William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare ran away to London and worked outside a picture palace.

 

Charles and Mary Lamb

It was Mary Lamb and Charles who between them wrote most of Shakespeare’s fairy tales.

 

William Wordsworth

Wordsworth wrote The Imitations of Immorality. K. Chesterton

G K Chesterton

Chesterton committed suicide at Bristol. He was only nineteen and very thin and hungry.

John Milton

Milton wrote “Paradise Lost”, then his wife died and he wrote ‘paradise regained’.

 

William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth’s poetry is too full of thoughts to be natural. His descriptions of sunsets are natural, but rural.

 

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson was known as the Doctor of Difinity because he wrote the first dictionary.

 

Virgil

Vergel was a man who used to clean up churches.

 

Virgil

Virgil was in love with a girl named Enid and wrote a lot of books about her.

 

Socrates

Socrates used to walk about on the ice without boots and it made ever so many of the people ashamed of him.

 

Plato.

Plato was the god of the Underground.

 

Autobiography.

An autobiography is the life of an animal written after it is dead as a moral.

 

Cicero.

Cicero wrote most of his books in Latin.

 

Geoffrey Chaucer.

Chaucer wrote the Arabian Knights, who were holy men like Prince Arthur etc,  that made pilgrimages to Canterbury and told tales round a table.

 

William Cowper

After twice committing suicide Cowper lived till 1800, when he died a natural death.

 

Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoi was leader of the Passive Resisters. He had his goods sold rather than be vaccinated.

 

George Eliot

George Eliot left a wife and children to mourn his genii.

 

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Robert Louis Stevenson first invented railways.

 

R.M.Healey

 

 

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