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We know of 14 events of note in literature and the arts that occurred on April 5:
- Arthur Halley, author (Hotel, Airport) was born on this day in 1920 in Canada.
- English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was born on this day in 1585. His view of humanity is most directly expressed in his prose work Leviathan (1651).
- French neoclassical painter Jean Fragonard, the master of the "boudoir" painting such as The Swing, was born on this day in 1732.
- Giacomo Casanova, Italian writer and adventurer, was born on this day in 1725. His name has become synonymous with sexual excess.
- On this day in 1607, Shakespeare's play Hamlet was performed aboard the British Ship Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in Africa, the first foreign performance of a Shakespeare play.
- On this day in 1636, Thomas Howell wrote to his friend Sir Thomas Hawk complaining that at a dinner the night before at the house of Ben Jonson, Jonson had carried on and on about the superiority of his poetic output to that of anyone else's. Howell excused Jonson's behavior, saying that if anyone had a right to be egotistical, it was Ben Jonson.
- On this day in 1699, philosopher John Locke wrote to Samuel Bold, "The thoughts that often come unsought, and drop into the mind are commonly the most valuable of any that we have."
- On this day in 1765, the English poet Edward Young died. His poem Night Thoughts is one of the hallmarks of the Graveyard School of Poetry.
- On this day in 1776, James Boswell recorded Dr. Samuel Johnson as having said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything except money."
- On this day in 1859, Charles Darwin sent the first pages of Origin of Species.
- On this day in 1924, The Saturday Evening Post printed an article by Scott Fitzgerald called "How We Live on $36,000 a Year. "Fitzgerald kept ledgers about his income, from the sparse days before 1920 through the boom years to the lean ‘30s. In the mid ‘20s, the Fitzgeralds were spending huge amounts on entertaining, maybe not on the scale of a Gatsby, but still lavishly. In the 1930s, most of Fitzgerald's money went for his wife's medical expenses and his daughter's private schooling, not extravagant living.
- On this day in 1926, American iconoclast H.L. Mencken was arrested for selling his banned American Mercury in Baltimore.
- On this day in 1954, Arturo Toscanini conducted the NBC orchestra for the last time, in a performance of the Bacchanale from Wagner's Lohengrin. He suffered a mental lapse, and one of the cellists rose to finish the piece. Toscanini was furious after the broadcast, threw the baton down, and left the stage.
- The English late-Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was born on this day in 1837, the first year of the Victorian Era. He was an early advocate of Blake. He had one of the finest ears of all poets in the language. His poem "The Garden of Proserpine" is redolent with compelling sounds and indulgent melancholy. He was a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites. He later was involved in a celebrated feud with the American author Emerson, who saw Swinburne as the worst provocateur of what the orthodox Victorians called the "fleshly school of poetry."
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