30 Sunday

July/August

Walter Pater, English aesthetician who formulated the theory of "art for art's sake" and hence unleashed Oscar Wilde, a full-bodied version of his repressed self, dies at Oxford, 1894.

31 Monday

Etienne Jodelle, who starred in the title role of his play Cléopâtre captive, the first French tragedy, and in private

life is reported to have taken many an asp to his bosom, dies at forty-one, 1573.

1 Tuesday

Stuart Merrill, an American poet who circulated a petition for Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol and thereby risked his own reputation, born at Hempstead, New York, 1863.

2 Wednesday

Adolf Hausrath, German Protestant theologian who used the pseudonym George Taylor when he wrote fiction, including the homosexual Antinous (1880), born in Karlsruhe, 1837.

3 Thursday

The poet Rupert Brooke, so strikingly handsome that several of his Cambridge classmates, including Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, fought each other for the favor of his company, born at Rugby, England, 1887.

4 Friday

Hans Christian Andersen, Danish fabulist, who, according to modern biographers, lived his own private fairy story, dies at seventy in Copenhagen, 1875.

5 Saturday

Lord Hervey, effeminate English statesman whom Alexander Pope hilariously satirized as "Lord Fanny" in Imitations of Horace and as "Sporus" (the boy-bride of Nero) in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, dies at Ickworth, 1743.

Hans Christian Andersen:

A rare photograph of a rara avis.