1723, again, a schoolmaster was acquitted, on account of his good reputation, of the charge of attempt on a boy of 15, his pupil, though the evidence seemed decidedly against him.  In 1730 a man was sentenced to death for sodomy effected on his young apprentice; this was a bad case and the surgeon’s evidence indicated laceration of the perineum.  Homosexuality of all kinds flourished, it will be seen, notwithstanding the fearless yet fair application of a very severe law.[89]

In more recent times Byron has frequently been referred to as experiencing homosexual affections, and I have been informed that some of his poems nominally addressed to women were really inspired by men.  It is certain that he experienced very strong emotions toward his male friends.  “My school-friendships,” he wrote, “were with me passions.”  When he afterward met one of these friends, Lord Clare, in Italy, he was painfully agitated; and could never hear the name without a beating of the heart.  At the age of 22 he formed one of his strong attachments for a youth to whom he left L7000 in his will.[90] It is probable, however, that here, as well as in the case of Shakespeare, and in that of Tennyson’s love for his youthful friend, Arthur Hallam, as well as of Montaigne for Etienne de la Boetie, although such strong friendships may involve an element of sexual emotion, we have no true and definite homosexual impulse; homosexuality is merely simulated by the ardent and hyperesthetic emotions of the poet.[91] The same quality of the poet’s emotional temperament may doubtless, also, be invoked in the case of Goethe, who is said to have written elegies which, on account of their homosexual character, still remain unpublished.

The most famous homosexual trial of recent times in England was that of Oscar Wilde, a writer whose literary reputation may be said to be still growing, not only in England but throughout the world.  Wilde was the son of parents who were both of unusual ability and somewhat eccentric.  Both these tendencies became in him more concentrated.  He was born with, as it were, a congenital antipathy to the commonplace, a natural love of paradox, and he possessed the skill to embody the characteristic in finished literary form.  At the same time, it must not be forgotten, beneath this natural attitude of paradox, his essential judgments on life and literature were usually sound and reasonable.  His essay on “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” witnessed to his large and enlightened conception of life, and his profound admiration for Flaubert to the sanity and solidity of his literary taste.  In early life he revealed no homosexual tendencies; he married and had children.  After he had begun to outgrow his youthful esthetic extravagances, however, and to acquire success and fame, he developed what was at first a simply inquisitive interest in inversion.  Such inquisitive interest is sometimes the sign of an emerging homosexual impulse.  It proved to be so in Wilde’s case and ultimately