'Anna Larpent's diary mentions over 440 titles, including forty-six English novels (She preferred those by women or works of sentimental fiction); twenty-two French works of fiction, including Rousseau, Marivaux, Marmontel and Voltaire; Italian imaginative literature, especially Goldoni and Netastasio; thirty-six French plays, notably those of Corneille; thirty-eight English plays, especially Shakespeare; more than sixty works on history, biography and social science, including Gibbon, Hume, Raynall, Rollin, Giucciardini, Adam Smith, Monboddo and Ferguson; sixteen books of natural philosophy, notably Fontenelle, Smellie, Goldsmith and the entire literature of the South Sea voyages; belles-lettres and criticism to the tune of forty-five volumes, among them Pope, Johnson, Boileau, Du Bos, Swift and Chesterfield; twenty-seven works of classics in translation, with Plutarch, Seneca, Virgil and Cicero as special favourites; a baker's dozen of advice books; forty-six collections of sermons and works of piety chiefly from latitudinarian divines but also from high churchmen and papists; the English poetic classics Spenser, Milton, Gay, Pope, Thomson, Young and Gray - as well as a smaller body of travel literature and miscellaneous work that is difficult to identify.'