more of poets than of any other people in the world." The sagacious old author of The Pleasures of Memory was greatly touched, and at the close of the interview he solemnly laid his hand on Algernon's head, and said, "I prophesy that you will be a poet too!" This visit did not lead Swinburne to reject Odes et Ballades in favour of Italy, but it stimulated his sense of the hieratic dignity of poets. Mr. Rogers was perhaps hardly a primate of song, but he was accredited in the service of Apollo, and he was extremely venerable. The interview, by Swinburne's own later declaration, confirmed the boy in his poetic calling.

It has been said that at Eton he had an extraordinarily wide knowledge of the Greek poets, and that he read them with ease in the original. His closest school-friend insists that this is incorrect, or should be reserved for the record of his advanced Oxford life. We are told that he left Eton knowing no more Greek than any intelligent schoolboy should, and the unquestioned success of his elegiacs was due more to his extraordinary gift of imitation than to any precocious familiarity with the Greek language. The mediocrity of his record, on arriving at Oxford, bears out this view. It is certain, however, that he was devoted to that charming anthology, the old Eton Poetae Graeci, to which he owed his earliest introduction to Theocritus and Alcaeus, and on which was founded his lifelong passion for Sappho. Long afterwards, as Mr. A. G. C. Liddell has reported, he was accustomed to say that the Poetae Graeci "had played a large part in fostering the love of poetry in his

mind." He is said by another schoolfellow to have complained that he found Theocritus "the hardest Greek lesson of the week," the lyric poets already attracting him far more vividly than the bucolic. His appreciation of Latin poetry was less cordial than his love of Greek, and remained so all his life. Catullus alone gave him pleasure of an ecstatic kind. Horace he disliked, and Lucretius bored him. In after years, when Raper expressed wonder that Swinburne did not enjoy the poetry of Virgil, greatest of all masters of alliteration and assonation, he replied that it was due to his having been made to learn that poet by heart at Eton. He said he liked to wait till a poet learned him by heart, and took possession of his soul as Sappho had done. He attributed his want of sympathy with most of the Latin classics to his having been forced to repeat them under compulsion.

The accounts of Algernon's behaviour in childhood and as a schoolboy have reached us through the memories of those who regarded him with love and admiration, but they are unanimous in representing him as unaggressive and self-contained, gentle, courteous, and gay. Lord Redesdale tells me that at school he was what is picturesquely called "a bag of nerves," and that the smallest obstacle ruffled him. But, although so irritable, he was not overbearing. It is highly probable that the arrogance which marred certain phases of his middle life, was absent in his childhood as it vanished from his se

rene old age. These superficial faults, excrescences upon his native character, were without

question the result of a disturbance of his nervous system, which had not begun at Eton. From earliest childhood he had the trick, whenever he grew the least excited, of stiffly drawing down his arms from his shoulders and giving quick vibrating jerks with his hands. His family always insisted that he spoilt his shoulders and made them sloping by this trick which dragged them down. If he happened to be seated at a moment of excitement, he would jerk his legs and twist his feet also, though with less violence. At such times his face would grow radiant with a rapt expression, very striking to witness. All this developed itself in early childhood, and alarmed his mother, who applied to a specialist for advice. After a close examination the physician's report was that these motions resulted from "an excess of electric vitality," and that any attempt to stop them would be harmful. Accordingly, to the very end of his life, whenever Swinburne was happy, or interested, or amused, he jerked his arms and fluttered his little delicate hands.

A certain change took place in Swinburne's character at the opening of his last year at school. He became less amenable to discipline and idler at his work. Francis Warre Cornish, when he was a new boy early in 1853, had the poet pointed out to him as "Mad Swinburne," and he tells me that he has never forgotten the impression he received of the strange figure. Through the summer of 1853 Swinburne had increasing trouble with Joynes of a rebellious kind, and in consequence of some representations he did not return to

Eton, although nothing had been said during the previous half about his leaving, and although at the last he seemed to be doing particularly well. When he left school he was within a few places of the headmaster's division. He had now entered his seventeenth year.

CHAPTER II

OXFORD

(1853-1859)

ALGERNON SWINBURNE left school in the summer of 1853, and he matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, on the 24th of January 1856. How he spent these two years and a half is not at present very clear. He was sixteen when he left Eton and he was nearly nineteen when he went to the University. These are important years in the life of most active and original minds, but we have no evidence that they left much trace upon his. There is reason to believe that at the back of his head, when he made further stay at Eton impossible for him, was the passionate wish to be trained for the army. He would have turned out to be a singular field-officer, it must be presumed, yet cavalry was what he was after. He saw himself galloping to the destruction of kings on a charger as black as night. He said himself that the Balaklava Charge (Oct. 25, 1854) "eclipsed all other visions," and the date of this proves that the desire to be a beau sabreur was no passing one. "To be prepared for such a chance as that was the one dream of my life." And, so late as 1891, he told Edward Burne-Jones that "the cavalry