John Gray (poet) French, German, Latin, music and art. In 1882 he passed the Civil Service exams and, five years later, the University of London matriculation exams. He joined the Foreign Office where he became a librarian. Gray is best known today as an aesthetic poet of the 1890s and as a friend of Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. He was also a talented translator, bringing works by the French Symbolists Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue and Arthur Rimbaud into English, often for the first time. He is purported to be the inspiration behind the title character in Wilde's "The
Thomas Bancroft (poet) a neighbour and fellow-poet, appears to have visited and been visited by him. On the evidence of one of his own epigrams and Sir Aston Cockayne's commendatory lines, in 1658 he was living in retirement at Bradley, near Ashbourne, Derbyshire. He continued there until his death, recorded in the church register there. It was said that Bancroft was 'small of stature', and that he published sermons. He was referred to as 'the small poet,' partly in reference to his stature, and partly in allusion to his "small" poems. Bancroft's first publication was "The Glvtton's Feaver" (1633), a narrative poem in