'Today his star is set...'

I see that today is Oscar Wilde's birthday (born 1854). Here is something I wrote some years ago about him – or rather about an altogether extraordinary Max Beerbohm essay, 'A Peep into the Past'...'Browsing my overcrowded bookshelves with a view to some thinning out, I came across a collection of previously uncollected pieces by Max Beerbohm, A Peep into the Past (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972) – definitely a keeper. The title essay is a quite extraordinary piece, written in 1893/4, when Max was a 21-year-old undergraduate, and apparently intended for the first issue of The Yellow Book (where, in the event, Beerbohm was represented by 'A Defence of Cosmetics'). 'A Peep into the Past' projects an alternative reality in which Oscar Wilde is an elderly, all but forgotten belle-lettrist, living 'a life of quiet retirement in his little house on Tite Street with his wife and two sons, his prop and mainstay, solacing himself with many a reminiscence of the friends of his youth'. 'Oscar Wilde!'…