Most Famous People in History.

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 284, 26 August 1922, Page 11

Most Famous People in History.

IT WOULD NOT BE AN EASY TASK for anyone to write down the names of, say, the sixty people who have had the greatest share of fame in the eyes of the world. It would be less easy still to place them in their proper order. Probably no two persons would agree, after they had gone beyond the the first name. Yet there is a criterion. Form the gigantic library of the British Museum, the largest in the world, There are roughly speaking, four million books.

Now as a man’s fame rests upon what a man does, and more especially on what other men say about him and his works, a useful guide to his( position on tho niche of fame may be found by estimating the number pf columns which his works, and particularly other people’s books on him and his works, occupy in the thousand volumes which comprise the catalogue to this stupendous library. There are two names which easily occupy first place. To each of them is allotted not. so many columns, or even pages, in the Index, but two whole volumes of the Index itself I Of these two great men, I venture to say that the name of one will be correctly guessed by ninety-nine people out of a hundred. It is,. of course, Shakespeare. The name of tho other man who occupies a position on the world’s scroll of fame equal in this respect to our own immortal poet is one which I venture to say not one person in a thousand would correctly mention. His name is Luther.

Here is tho list of the first sixty, arranged according to the space occupied in the British Museum catalogue:—

1, Shakespeare; 2, Luther; 3, Cicero; 4, Goethe; 5, Danto; 6, Aristotle; 7 Homer- 8, Virgil; 9, Horace; 10, Napoleon; 11, Cervantes; 12, Milton; 13, Scott;’l4, Dickens; 15, Charles I.; 16, Plato; 17, Schiller; 18, Voltaire; 19’ Tolstoi; 20, Bunyan; 21, Byron; 22, Euripides; 23, Sophocles; 24, Julius Caesar; 25, Moliere; 26, Petrarch; 27, Plutarch; 28, Hippocratqs; 29, Tacitus; 30 Pope • 31, Wagner; 32, Louis XVI.; 33, Goldsmith; 34, Galen; 35, Xenophon; 86, Swift; 37, Dumas; 38, Swedenborg ; 39, Aeschylus; 40, Livy ; 41, Terence; 42, Tennyson; 43, /Esop; 44, Aristophanes; 45, Defoe; 46, Victor Hugo; 47, Cromwell; 48, Tasso; 49, Calvin; 50, Wesley; 51, Gladstone; 52, Plautus ; 53, Bacon ; 54, Chaucer: 55, Burns; 56, William III.; 57, Johnson; 58, Rousseau; 59, Louis XIV.; 60, Queen Victoria.