Swinburne received him in Nichol's house with great affability, laying his hand upon Davidson's head in a sort of benediction, and addressing him as "Poet." My friend Mr. Alexander Hedderwick remembers Swinburne at this time "marching about the Quadrangle, very fashionably dressed, in a close-fitting long Melton coat of dark blue, and the neatest of little shoes, his top hat balanced on his great mop of hair, a marvel to our rough Glasgow students." From February 1877 to June 1879 he was in a state of constant febrility and ill-health in London, and permanently, if I remember right, in his rooms in Great James Street. He positively refused to go down to Holmwood at the summons of his mother, who wrote, in July 1878, that she had not seen him since April of the preceding year.

Lord Houghton found him in a sad condition, but not all the entreaties of his family would induce him to stir, or to permit them to visit him, until June 1879, when he was persuaded to spend a month at Holmwood. The succeeding months of August and September were the most deplorable in his whole career. When he seemed actually at the doors of death, Theodore Watts, with the approval of the distressed and bewildered Lady Jane Swinburne, arrived very early one morning and carried the poet by force to his own rooms, which were now close by. Thence, as soon as he was partially recovered, to Putney, where in an amazingly short space of time Swinburne regained his health so that he was soon once more writing with unabated vigour.

CHAPTER VIII

PUTNEY

(1879-1909)

IN September 1879 Swinburne was removed, as has been said, in a state of health which seemed almost desperate, from Watts' rooms in Great James Street, to the upper storey of a semidetached villa at Putney, which Theodore Watts now took for the purpose.' He was at first too ill to see any one or to write a letter, yet, such was his recuperative vitality, that by the middle of October he was once more able to resume his correspondence and his literary work, and to enjoy regular exercise out-of-doors. He wrote to Lord Houghton :

I keep no chambers in town henceforth, or (probably) for ever finding after but too many years' trial that in the atmosphere of London I can never expect more than a fortnight at best of my usual health and strength. Here I am, like Mr. Tennyson at Farringford, “close to the edge of a noble down," and I might add "Far out of sight, sound, smell of the town," and yet within an easy hour's run of Hyde Park Corner and a pleasant drive of Chelsea, where I have some friends lingering.

1 The lease was granted for twenty-one years, from the 18th of September 1879, to Walter Theodore Watts, "of Ivy Lodge, Werter Road, Putney," that being the residence of Watts' sister, Mrs. Mason.

His prophecy was fulfilled; The Pines, Putney Hill, continued to be his address for the remainder of his life, that is for nearly thirty years. During this long period, Swinburne led an existence of the greatest calm, passivity, and resignation, without a struggle and apparently without a wish for liberty of action. He abandoned all attempt at initiative, in return for benefits of watchful care, assiduous protection, and a relief from every species of responsibility. His life was "sheltered" like that of a child, and he was able to concentrate his faculties upon literature and his dreams without a shadow of disturbance. "A child at play with his toys," an acute and indulgent observer of those days called him, "a child turning for comfort, self-forgetfulness, and consolation to poetry, itself, in a sense, a toy.”

Watts undertook to relieve him of all business worries. Swinburne was not a lodger at The Pines, but joint-householder with Watts, and in theory all expenses were to be equally divided. The poet wrote to John Nichol: "My own little money matters have been getting into such an accursed tangle that unless Watts had once more taken them in hand I should ere now" (the winter of 1879) "have found my assets reduced to what the old Enemy calls 'Zero, or even a frightful minus quantity."" Swinburne was easily annoyed by business letters, the receipt of which made him quiver with irritation. For the remainder of his life he handed such unpleasant objects to his friend, without glancing at them. An exception must be noted in his correspondence about the publication of his books, which he

always insisted on conducting with Mr. Andrew Chatto himself.

His days were divided with an almost mechanical precision. Swinburne was never an early riser, but towards the middle of every morning, no matter what the weather, he went out for a long walk, generally in the one direction 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. For many years he was a constant visitor at the shop of the Misses Frost, at the corner of Ridgeway and High Street, going into Wimbledon; from these ladies he regularly bought his newspapers and ordered his books, and their house was the bourne of his walk in a southerly direction. Very seldom he crossed the river northwards into London.

In storm and rain, always without an umbrella, the little erect figure, with damp red curls emerging from under a soft felt hat, might be seen walking, walking, "pelting along all the time as fast as I can go," 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 mid-day luncheon, or dinner; and at 2.30, with clock-work regularity, he "disappeared to enjoy a siesta,' which sometimes lasted until 4.30. Then he would work for a while, and Watts-Dunton reported to Mr. Wise that in the afternoon he often sat in his study on the ground floor, and "heard Swinburne in his own room overhead walking round and round the floor for ten minutes

at a time, composing, and then silence would fall for five minutes while Swinburne was writing down the new stanza or sentence, and then the promenade would begin again as before." The rest of the day was mostly spent among his books, which were not only numerous, but included many that were choice and rare.

In the evening his regular habit was to read aloud. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Swinburne was an insatiable and continuous novel-reader. He was so fond of Dickens that he read through the whole of his novels every three years, and Watts-Dunton used to declare that Swinburne had read them aloud to him "at least three times." This was his favourite reading, but he could, and did, read anything in the shape of a novel which the circulating library supplied. His casual remarks about novels were often piquant, and familiar. I remember that he dismissed Guy Deverell as "too hasty, too blurred and blottesque," and said of Uncle Silas that the hero "would be more ghastly if he were less ghostly." He took a vivid interest in the novels of his young kinsman, Mr. Richard Bagot, and particularly in the earliest, A Roman Mystery, where the study of lycanthropy attracted him.

He explained to me once that he did not regard current novels as literature but as life, and that in his absolutely detached existence they took the place of real adventures. 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