Containing an historical and critical account of the lives and writings of the most eminent persons in every nation; particularly the British and Irish; from the earliest accounts to the present time.
A NEW EDITION,
Revised and enlarged by
Alexander Chalmers, F. S. A.
1812 - 1817
I (Liam Quin) have made this online edition using a combination of OCR, hand re-keying, and the use of up to five other electronic editions. Three of those are from Google Books, and are actually really bad; the primary text was done at the University of Toronto, and another version from the University of California at San Diego was compared. I bought my copy in Oxford in 1991, and have wanted to make an online version ever since.
There are still lots of OCR errors (and transcription errors too!). I have checked all of the headings up to the middle of volume 8 (in C somewhere). Since the URI (Web Address) of each entry depends on the name of the person, as I fix typos, some of the URLs change. I also hope to link scanned images to the page breaks, so that other people can help, or so I can send the text to Project Gutenberg maybe, but it is a long way from being ready for that: I want to make sure I can use the result of any such work, by having the headings match.
Remember also that this text was written in 1811 through to 1817 or so, and in many cases earlier. The writer is also partisan (for example, he is clearly anti-Roman Catholic) in a way that would be thought odd today for a biographer.
You are welcome to link to these pages, as long as you think the heading is spelt right, but I would advise against copying the text onto places like Wikipedia: first, it's biased, and second, there are still errors.
Questions or comments? Contact liam at holoweb dot net, mentioning the colour of your socks in the subject line to get past spam filters, e.g. Socks: pink with green lace.