nervous and yet spirited man like Swinburne '—who, it may be told, had already, by his excesses, superinduced a kind of epilepsy upon his habitual twitch.

'It took the form of a convulsive fit, in which, generally after a period of very great cerebral excitement, he would suddenly fall unconscious. These fits were excessively distressing to witness, and produced a shock of alarm all the more acute because of the death-like appearance of the patient. Oddly enough, however, the person who seemed to suffer from them least was Swinburne himself. The only real danger appeared to be that he would hit himself in his fall, which indeed he repeatedly and severely did. But his general recovery after these fits was magical, and it positively struck one-if it is not absurd to say so that he was better after them, as after a storm of the nerves.'

So it happened again and again. The Admiral would be hastily summoned to London to take his son home to the country. In two days' time Algernon would be out and about,

'good boy' chastened, affectionate, extremely docile. Then after some weeks would come the return to London, and in due course more 'irregularity,' more irritability, more quarrels with his best friends, another fit, another telegram to the Admiral, another swift recovery. It seemed to work out like a sum with a recurrent decimal; but actual life is less tolerant of recurrent 'irregularity' than is mathematics. In actual life you may expel nature with a thyrsus-at non tamen usque recurret. The crash came in August 1879. He had lost his father; he had alienated his friends; he had a fancy for a while to have nothing to do with his family, even with his mother. He lived lonely in his rooms in Great James Street, in a state of constant febrility and ill-health.' There an illness took him and carried him to the very doors of death, just outside of which Mr. Theodore Watts (afterwards WattsDunton) entered upon the scene and saved him.

VII

Mr. Watts, a solicitor of St. Ives in Huntingdonshire, had come up to London in the year 1872 or thereabouts with an ardent enthusiasm for the group of Pre-Raphaelites, and had been baffled in a first attempt to make Swinburne's acquaintance. Towards the end of the year, however, Madox Brown advised Swinburne, whose business affairs he knew to be in a

tangle, to place them in the hands of Theodore Watts; which he did, with very happy results.

In September 1879, then, armed with the approval of Lady Jane Swinburne, Watts called at 3 Great James Street and, finding the poet in a truly deplorable condition, carried him almost by force to his own rooms, close by, and thence, after a week or two, to the upper storey of a semi-detached villa at Putney, hired for the purpose. Again Swinburne made an amazing recovery. By the middle of October he was able to resume his correspondence, to read, and even to walk out of doors. But he had been near enough to the grave to look into it and henceforth he put himself into Watts's tutelage with a child-like and most pathetic trust. A lease was taken of 'The Pines,' Putney, and there the two lived together for nearly thirty years. Watts supervised the poet's food and drink, administered his moneys, kept away callers (with the help of an inexorable maidservant), and mapped out his days with almost mathematical precision. Towards the middle of every morning Swinburne, no matter what the weather, took a long walk 'generally up Putney Hill and over the 'Heath, but sometimes along the Richmond Road to the 'Mortlake Arms, and then through Barnes Common as far as 'Barnes Green and the Church.' At the corner-shop of the Misses Frost, going into Wimbledon, he bought his newspapers and ordered his books.

In storm and rain, always without an umbrella, the little erect figure, with damp curls emerging from under a soft felt hat, might be seen walking, walking . . . so that he became a portent and a legend throughout the confines of Wandsworth and Wimbledon. He always returned home a little while before the midday luncheon, or dinner; and at 2.30, with clockwork regularity, he disappeared to enjoy a siesta," which sometimes lasted until 4.30. Then he would work for a while. . . . In the evening his regular habit was to read aloud. . In these conditions his health became perfect; he developed into a sturdy little old man without an ache or a pain; and he who had suffered so long in London from absence of appetite and wasting insomnia, for the last thirty years of his life at Putney ate like a caterpillar and slept like a dormouse."

Walking, walking,' for thirty years. But that which walked was the ghost of the poet who had written Atalanta' and 'Poems and Ballads.' It is pretty safe to say that Watts

had saved Swinburne's life: it is certain that he had averted a tragedy and against this positive deed of friendship and thirty years of devotion little is set by sneering at Watts as 'a pedicure of the Muses '-which, we believe, was Meredith's phrase for him. It must be allowed, however, that Watts averted tragedy only by turning these thirty years into comedy, and rather absurd comedy. The worst was not that Watts, in the jealousy of his sway, allowanced the supply of other friends even more sternly than he cut down 'The Bard's' liquor; nor that, as elderly ladies succumb to the wiles of the tramp, he and Swinburne, while mostly inaccessible to real authors, were given to open their door to any who oiled its key with praise of Watts's own preposterous novel ' Aylwin.' Nor was it even the worst that, happening in his own way to dislike such faulty but full-blooded poets as Byron and Walt Whitman, he drew Swinburne to abuse both, whom he had formerly admired, and recant noble praise in terms of scurrility. The unpardonable fault was that, admiring the rhetorical aptitude which had always been Swinburne's bane, he encouraged him to substitute rhetoric for poetry and rhetoric for prose and so, while Swinburne wrote much in these thirty years especially on Shakespeare that was marvellous; though Swinburne himself be to blame that the more he learned of Mary Queen of Scots the more it got in the way of poetry about her; old lovers of his verse and prose cannot help feeling that 'the rest is silence' may be, after all, a better epitaph than the rest is-rhetoric.'

We will not quote for disparagement the worst passages which deal with Byron and Whitman in Miscellanies' and 'Studies in Prose and Poetry' (1891 and 1894); but we will append a passage on Byron, written in 1866, to show what a prose-writer was lost in Swinburne :

'His work was done at Missolonghi; all of his work for which the fates could spare him time. A little space was allowed him to show at least a heroic purpose, and attest a high design; then, with all things unfinished before him and behind, he fell asleep after many troubles and triumphs. Few can ever have gone wearier to the grave; none with less fear. He had done enough to earn his rest. Forgetful now and set free for ever from all faults and foes, he passed through the doorway of no ignoble death out of reach of time, out of sight of love, out of hearing of hatred, beyond the blame of England and the praise of Greece. In the

full strength of spirit and of body his destiny overtook him, and made an end of all his labours. He had seen and borne and achieved more than most men on record. "He was a great man, good at many things, and now he had attained his rest.'

VIII

We have indicated what we think the worst to be lamented of those last thirty years, and, for all our debt to the memory of Mr. Watts-Dunton and our gratitude for the work Swinburne accomplished in those years, it remains lamentable. Desperate causes may require desperate remedies: the devotion which applied these and kept a friend alive and happy cannot, must not, be slighted. But as little can its effect be gainsaid-that a biography of Swinburne must, to be true, overbalance the end with the beginning and can hardly, to be told well, escape being told with a touch of ironic humour, of laughter amid tears for humanity and its ways. Mr. Gosse has written it so; written it with infallible tact; written it just as well as it could be written. But it is so, and the pity is it should be so. How were the roses so fresh and so fair! . . . This man, who succumbed to frailty, was a splendid poet, and his verse will yet avenge him on Time. Meanwhile

'Who shall seek thee and bring

And restore thee thy day,

When the dove dipt her wing

And the oars won their way

Where the narrowing Symplegades whitened the straits of

Propontis with spray?'

ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.

DEMOCRACY IN PARAGUAY

I. Paraguay: Crónicas Americanas.

Crónicas Americanas. By W. JAIME MOLINS.

Buenos Aires: Molinari. 1915.

2. Brought Forward. By R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM. Duckworth. 1916.

3. A Vanished Arcadia. By R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM. Heinemann. 1901.

4. Latin America: Its Rise and Progress. By F. GARCIACALDERON. T. Fisher Unwin. 1913.

HE best way of reaching the Republic of Paraguay, and

The delectable city of Asuncion, is by river-boat from

Buenos Aires. During the hundred and odd hours of the vessel's leisurely progress, there is time and to spare for profitable meditation. To watch the banks drift gently by, their straggling settlements and little clearings standing out pathetically, like brief glimpses of Arcadia, against the tangled wilderness of jungle and swamp; to mark the slowly changing features of the land and of the strangely interesting mestizo race, sprung from the admixture of Iberian and Indian blood; above all, to realise something of the stupendous force and fertility of subtropical plant life-an incalculable factor in the history of this part of the continent—this, surely, is the right way to pass from the bustling modernity of Buenos Aires to the silent places, haunted of dreams that never could come true, at the heart of South America. Furthermore, for those of studious bent, desirous of evoking the atmosphere proper to the better understanding of Paraguay and her remnant people, the leisure of these drowsy ship-board days may profitably be beguiled by reading Father Dobrixhoffer's History of the 'Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay,' and Mr. Cunninghame Graham's Vanished Arcadia.'

From Reconquista, northwards to the River Bermejo, skirting the lagoons and thickly wooded shore of the Chaco Austral, there are long hours of sunshine tempered by cool winds, in which to dream and picture to yourself the life of this land in those far-distant days when, after the passing of the