| Description | Commonplace book compiled by Sir William Drake. Notes on various subjects and another copied extract from Bacon's "The Advancement of Learning", wrongly paginated from the 1605 edition. This is the same as the extract in MS OGDEN 7/7.
There are many references to authors used throughout the collection such as Tacitus, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Cardan and Bacon. The main headings include 'Nature of men' (also 'Mans Nature' and 'Natura horninám'); 'How to win Reputation and glory'; 'Proverbs tending to profit or frugality' (also 'Proverbia ex variis authoribus', 'Forms of speech and proverbs' and 'Proverbs out of diverse languages'); 'Some fowle practises discovered'; 'Short notes of Civili Conversation'; 'Discourses'; 'World discovered'; 'Judgments and observations taken out of Nic: Michivels workes'; 'Negotiating'; 'Concerning Matters of Husbandry and Commerce'; 'Ordnary Gallants Manners in these tymes'; 'Maxim of Craft'; 'Precepts of Wedlock'; 'Industry expressed in examples'; 'Education'; 'Maximes taken out of Machivel Ghichardine Cardan being meere polletitians without Religion.'.
There are several individual extracts from Cardan (including De subtilitate rerum and De varietate rerum) and Campanella (including De politica and De oeconomica in Realis philosophiae epilogisticae partes quatuor, Frankfurt, 1623, and Astrologicorum libri VI, Lyons or Rome, 1629), also some short notes on Epistolae of Aeneas Sylvius, Pope Pius II; Bodin, De republica, Lyons, 1586; notes on eloquentia and dissimulatio from Tacitus; 'Sententia ex Euripide Tragéd: ex Grutero super Euripidem'; Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, 1623; Nicolas Caussin, The holy court, trans. T. H(awkins), 1626-1634; and 'Some notes taken out of a letter sent by one George Leicester Marchant to Alderman Spencer'. |