conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled Heroes of History about Horrible, Geography, York with the genre: Children's Books, Biographies?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author has written over 300 books for children, including the bestselling Horrible Geography series. She lives in York with her husband, son, daughter, three dogs and cat.<BR><BR>Joe Todd Stanton is an illustrator from the United Kingdom.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Heroes of History
  Having expanded the Empire to its greatest extent—from Britain and Spain to the Black Sea and the Euphrates—he called a halt to further conquest and resolved to replace war with legislation. He expressed his surprise "that Alexander did not regard it as a greater task to set in order the empire that he had won than to win it." The Pax Romana had begun.
  Under this Roman peace every part of the realm could export goods and ideas, import the latest fads and creeds. Now the Hellenistic world—Greece, the Near East, and Egypt—creators and inheritors of rich and diverse cultures—could pour their poetry and prose, their old faiths and new doubts, their sciences and philosophies and arts, into a Rome still intellectually eager, ready to receive new religions, poetical ecstasies, and architectural forms.
  The nightingale mourning, beneath the poplar's shadow, the loss of her young ones, whom some hard plowman has seen and torn unfledged from their nest; all night long she cries, and perched on a spray, renews her pitiful song, filling the woods with her sad lament.
  To achieve form, study the Greeks day and night. Avoid words that are new, obsolete, or sesquipedalian—"foot-and-a-half words." If your product survives all this, hide it away for eight years. If then it still pleases you, publish it, but remember that it may shame your maturity. If you write dramas, obey the three unities—of action, time, and place. Study life and philosophy, for without study and understanding, a perfect style is an empty vessel, too fragile for our use.
  The man whose word had become law from York to Baalbek to Cádiz lived all the while a life of unassuming simplicity, shunning the luxuries of wealth and the emoluments of office, wearing the simple garments woven by the women in his home, and sleeping in a small room of what had been the palace of the orator Hortensius.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know two more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The facade of St. Mark's gleamed with gilt and almost haphazard ornament; nearly every decade brought to it new spoils and forms, until the face of the great church became a bizarre medley of architecture, sculpture, and mosaic, in which decoration drowned structure, and the parts forgot the whole. To admire that facade one must stand 576 feet away, at the farther end of the Piazza San Marco; then the brilliant conglomeration of Romanesque portal, Gothic ogees, classic columns, Renaissance railing, and Byzantine domes blends into one exotic phantasm, an Aladdin's magic dream.
  It was a vainglory and yet a glory that the Venetians wanted pictures: individuals to perpetuate their excellences—hence so many masterpieces by Titian; the government to impress its subjects with its power and dignity—hence some of the finest murals in history; the Church to tell the Christian story to the people, of whom only a few could read—hence so many Annunciations, Nativities, Visitations, Massacres of the Innocents, Flights to Egypt, Transfigurations, Last Suppers, Crucifixions, Entombments, Resurrections, Ascensions, Martyrdoms. Even the Greeks had had no such success in perpetuating their creeds.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Mark's gleamed with gilt and almost haphazard ornament; nearly every decade brought to it new spoils and forms, until the face of the great church became a bizarre medley of architecture, sculpture, and mosaic, in which decoration drowned structure, and the parts forgot the whole. To admire that facade one must stand 576 feet away, at the farther end of the Piazza San Marco; then the brilliant conglomeration of Romanesque portal, Gothic ogees, classic columns, Renaissance railing, and Byzantine domes blends into one exotic phantasm, an Aladdin's magic dream.
  It was a vainglory and yet a glory that the Venetians wanted pictures: individuals to perpetuate their excellences—hence so many masterpieces by Titian; the government to impress its subjects with its power and dignity—hence some of the finest murals in history; the Church to tell the Christian story to the people, of whom only a few could read—hence so many Annunciations, Nativities, Visitations, Massacres of the Innocents, Flights to Egypt, Transfigurations, Last Suppers, Crucifixions, Entombments, Resurrections, Ascensions, Martyrdoms. Even the Greeks had had no such success in perpetuating their creeds.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He was not, as Pope thought, "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind." Montaigne was wiser, Voltaire brighter, Henry VIII meaner; and Bacon's enemies called him kindly, helpful, and quick to forgive. He was self-seeking to the point of servility, and proud enough to anger the gods, but we share these faults sufficiently to pardon his humanity for the light that he shed. His egotism was the wind in his sails. To see ourselves as others see us would be crippling.
  Perhaps the statesman stressed unduly the utilitarian ends of science; yet he recognized the value of "pure" as compared with "applied" science—of "light" as distinct from "fruits." He urged a study of ends as well as means, and foresaw that a century of inventions might create greater problems than it solved if it left human nature unchanged. He might have discovered in his own moral laxity the abyss created by the progress of knowledge beyond the discipline of character.
  What remains after all these hindsight deductions? This: that Francis-Bacon was the most powerful and influential intellect of his time. Of course Shakespeare stood above him in imagination and literary art, in subtlety of perception and thought; but Bacon's mind ranged over the universe like a searchlight peering and prying curiously into every nook and secret of space. All the exhilarating and expanding enthusiasms of the Renaissance were in him, all the excitement and pride of Columbus sailing madly into a new world. Hear the joyful cry of Cock Robin announcing the dawn:
  Men would not listen to him at first; in England, France, and Germany they preferred to carry the competition of faiths to the arbitrament of arms; but when their fury had cooled, those who were not fettered with certainties organized themselves in the spirit of Bacon for the enlargement of man's empire not over men but over the conditions and hindrances of human life.
  He raised a banner for all the sciences, and drew to it the most eager minds of the succeeding centuries. Whether he willed it or not, the enterprise that he called for—the comprehensive organization of scientific research, the ecumenical expansion and dissemination of knowledge—contained in itself the seeds of the profoundest drama of modern times: Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, fighting for its life against the spread and power of science and philosophy. That drama had now spoken its prologue to the world.