trustful and confiding. He thought no evil of those to whom he had granted his affection, but he was subject to violent and excessive revulsion of feeling if he discovered, or thought that he discovered, that his kindness had been repulsed. His sentiment for Matthew Arnold, expressed over and over again, in almost hyperbolic terms, received a rude shock in 1895 when Arnold's Letters were collected by a well-known person. This editor, either through carelessness or malice, allowed a passage to be printed which gave Swinburne exquisite annoyance. He had been present, in company with Froude, Browning, Ruskin, Herbert Spencer, George Lewes and Matthew Arnold, at a dinner-party given by Monckton Milnes in June 1863. Matthew Arnold, describing this dinner in a letter to his mother, very innocently mentioned as curiosities "a Cingalese in full costume, and a sort of pseudoShelley called Swinburne.' That such a phrase should be printed in the lifetime of a famous man-of-letters was inexcusable. Swinburne came upon it by accident, and it turned all his long admiration for Arnold to gall and hatred.

With regard to Swinburne's manner of work, it was modified by his extreme dislike to the physical act of writing. What he called "the curse of penmanship" weighed heavily upon him. This was due to a weakness of the wrist which began to show itself quite early in life, and was at one time a little alarming. It developed, however, very slowly, and was at no time absolutely serious, but it made the act of holding a pen very irksome. The progress

of this weakness may be traced in Swinburne's handwriting, which about 1862 became so feeble and illegible that he altered his style of holding the pen, his manuscript thereby becoming easier to read, but still more wearisome to write. The actual battling with ink and paper being a positive and often a painful effort, Swinburne evaded it as much as possible. He wrote to John Morley (May 17, 1880): "Copying is impossible to me; I could never learn the art of transcription; and I always blunder. I used always to think it, and I do now, the heaviest, brutallest and stupidest of school punishments."

He gave up copying his poems, even for the press, and adopted the habit of sending to the printers his first rough draft, with all his corrections and changes. The result is that from the time of Chastelard downward few works of Swinburne's exist or have ever existed in a MS. duplicate.1 Swinburne nourished the belief that his hatred of the act of writing was shared by Shakespeare, whose "villainous pothooks" he used to compare with his own. He spoke, not without a certain complacency, of his "exceptionally awful scrawl, almost as bad as Landor's own

the only point on which I can hope to rival him in writing, if even there he can ever be rivalled, except by Shakespeare." It has been suggested to me by Mr. Wise, who was unusually familiar with Swinburne's methods, that his physical

1 Mr. T. J. Wise, who has made a close study of Swinburne's MSS., tells me that there are two copies of the Song of Italy and of a certain number of sonnets. He has seen fragments of a duplicate MS. of Tristram. But, with these modifications, he confirms my general statement in the text.

difficulty in writing, and his habit of composing, revising, and working up his complete sentence before struggling with the unwelcome pen, had something to do with the artificial and ponderous character of his later prose.

APPENDIX I

SWINBURNE AT ETON

A LETTER FROM LORD REDESDALE

1 KENSINGTON COURTS,

MY DEAR GOSSE

May 10, 1912.

Here are the criticisms which suggest themselves to me on Mr. -'s letter to the Times about Swinburne's Eton days. You will see that my personal recollections do not tally with his.

Amina, the ghoul of the Arabian Nights, and the archetype of the genus, was a lady. But there are also male ghouls and even sexless ghouls, and it is to a subdivision of the latter that a certain species of literary ghouls must be referred. These batten upon the fame of the illustrious dead. An inspired poet or prophet, a prince of letters, passes away. That is your ghoul's opportunity. Immediately he indites a letter to the Times or to any other newspaper that will give him print, in a fever of impatience to give to the world what he is pleased to call his "reminiscences." may never have known the great man, he may have just received a nod from him, or even have been cut dead that is immaterial-upon the perilous foundation of that nod, or no-nod, he will build his crazy fabric.

He

Algernon Charles Swinburne died in the spring of 1910. Revelling in the pleasures of the imagination Mr. at once fired off a letter to the Times upon the subject of Swinburne's Eton days, and in that letter there is hardly a word which does not show that the

writer knew nothing about Swinburne, and that his vaunted friendship with the poet was a myth. In the first place Swinburne did not board at Coleridge's but at Joynes's. I doubt whether he ever set foot in the former House, for he was a very stay-at-home boy, shy and reserved - not at all given to gadding about in other houses and other boys' rooms. Had Mr. known him "fairly well," he must at least have remembered to what House he belonged. As a matter of fact I never saw them speak to one another. I was Swinburne's first cousin, and bound by ties of deep affection and gratitude to his mother my aunt. During the first part of his stay at Eton, we were much together, and, as I shall show presently, very intimate. To my sorrow the friendship was interrupted by circumstances which unavoidably separated us. There was no quarrel, no shadow of a misunderstanding. But I was sent into College, Swinburne remained an Oppidan. Between the Collegers and the Oppidans there was little or no traffic.

also was a Colleger, and the same reason that parted Swinburne and me, closely related as we were, and intimate as we had been, would almost preclude from even making his acquaintance outside of the schoolroom. Had there been any friendship between them it could hardly have escaped my knowledge. In 1853 I left College and became once more an Oppidan: but it was too late: Swinburne had left or was just leaving. In after days our lives lay widely apart. Only once did I meet him in intimacy. We had a long delightful talk, but it was a flash in the pan. The fates drove us asunder again.

Swinburne entered Eton at the beginning of the summer half of 1849. His father, the Admiral, and my aunt, Lady Jane, brought him, and at once sent for me to put him under my care. I was to "look after him." It is true that I was only a few weeks older than himself, and so, physically, not much of a protector; but I had already been three years at school, to which