Rene Descartes, mathematician and philospher, b. 1596. Eldest Daughter read something by Descartes in one of her classes, and she’s added him to the list of historical characters for whom she has a strong antipathy. I’ll bet even she’d feel sorry for him after reading about his sad end:

In 1649 Queen Christina of Sweden persuaded Descartes to go to Stockholm. However the Queen wanted to draw tangents at 5 a.m. and Descartes broke the habit of his lifetime of getting up at 11 o’clock. After only a few months in the cold northern climate, walking to the palace at 5 o’clock every morning, he died of pneumonia. –

Franz Josef Haydn, musician and composer, b. 1732.

Edward Fitzgerald, translator and poet, b. 1809. It’s difficult to say how much of Edward Fitzgerald’s “translation” of the eleventh century poet, philosopher, and scientist Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is Fitzgerald and how much is Khayyam. Although a rather free translation, his version or versions are said to be more true to the spirit of the original than any more literal translation. It was my old friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti who made Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam famous when he commended it.

Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come.
Ah, take the Cash, and let the promise go,
Nor heed the music of a distant Drum!

Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, author of A Diary from Dixie, b. 1823. This diary is often quoted in the Ken Burns series on the Civil War. You can read it online. Mrs. Chesnut’s husband was a U.S. senator from South Carolina and then an aide to Jefferson Davis during the War.

Andrew Lang, poet, novelist, editor, folklorist, historian, biographer, scholar, and essayist, b. 1844. Of course, we know Lang for his multi-colored fairy tales books.

Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty, b. 1820. “We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.” Black Beauty is, of course, the definitive horse story and the prime example of an argument in fiction for the humane treatment of animals. Anna Sewell was disabled at the age of fourteen when a sprained (or maybe broken?) ankle was treated improperly. For the rest of her life, she depended on a pony cart for transportation since she could no longer walk. She began writing Black Beauty when she was in her forties after a doctor told her she had only a year to live. The book actually took her more than five years to write, and she died a few months after its publication. Anna Sewell and her family were Quakers and believed in non-violence toward people and animals.
I wonder what Anna Sewell would say about Terri Schiavo?

“My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”
“Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody’s business to interfere when they see it.”

Also, Vincent Van Gogh, artist, b. 1853. Go here to view all of Van Gogh’s paintings, letters, and other works online. You can also purchase a Van Gogh poster or read what critics think about Van Gogh’s work.
Paul Verlaine, French Decadent poet, b. 1844. I don’t read French, so I can’t really comment on his poetry, but he seems to have lived a decadent life. Somewhere in the middle of all the decadence, he converted to Catholicism, but the conversion may have been just another experiment in tasting all the sensatons that life had to offer.
I can’t think that either Van Gogh or Verlaine would have been easy or pleasant to know or to love.