Nichol and Swinburne - Dicey, George Rankine Luke ("our chief of men in our college days," whose career of high promise was cut short by drowning in the Isis in 1862), George Birkbeck Hill, and Algernon Grenfell; while T. H. Green, Pater, J. A. Symonds, Bywater, Caird, and those eminent survivors, Professor Holland and Lord Bryce, were afterwards included.1 The society met in one another's rooms once a week in term-time, and read either essays or passages chosen by the host. The meetings, Professor Holland tells me, invariably took place after dinner, over cups of coffee. Although Nichol avoided general companionship, he was very assiduous in cultivating his particular friends. Who these were have just been mentioned, and there exists a large photographic group of them, where Swinburne is discovered near the centre of the front, a prominence which he owes, no doubt, to his diminutive size. Of his contributions to debate none are preserved, but we learn that on the 13th of February 1857, during the absence of Nichol, who was ill, Swinburne praised the satiric genius of Dryden to the detriment of that of Pope and Byron.

Lord Bryce remembers a meeting in Swinburne's rooms in 1858, at which the host read Browning's essay prefixed to the forged Letters of Shelley; and afterwards repeated, or rather

1 Professor T. E. Holland has very kindly given me a list of all the members of the Old Mortality. "A body of twenty rules was adopted at a meeting held on the 2nd of May, 1857, when the discussion turned upon Hume's Essay in defence of Suicide." The Society seems to have come to an end in 1876, at a dinner at All Souls College, to which Swinburne was invited, but after accepting, failed to turn up.

chanted, to his friends a few of Browning's poems, in particular, "The Statue and the Bust," "The Heretic's Tragedy," and "Bishop Blougram's Apology."

Of those present only Swinburne himself and Nichol had, so far as Lord Bryce can recall, ever read any of Browning's poems. Two or three years later everybody was reading them. Swinburne had in those days an immense admiration for Ruskin. Lord Bryce recollects that one Sunday afternoon, when he dropped in upon him, Swinburne took down a volume and read aloud, with admirable expression, a long description of an old boat lying on the shore, and of all it had been and had seen.

Already Swinburne knew far more of English poetical literature than either Nichol or any other of the group, and stood alone among them as widely read in French and Italian. Nichol once remarked to Lord Bryce, "He is the one among us who certainly has genius." No one of his friends of the Old Mortality doubted that; the only question was whether his strange erratic mind would ever concentrate itself upon the production of a large piece of work. Already Swinburne was curiously detached from most of the common interests of humanity. T. H. Green was accustomed to chuckle as he described a meeting of the Old Mortality, where he read an essay on the development of Christian Dogma. He happened to look up once from his paper, and nearly burst out laughing at the sight of Swinburne, whose face wore an expression compounded of unutterable ennui and naïf astonishment that men whom he respected could take interest in such a subject.

The year 1857 saw a considerable ripening of Swinburne's intellectual powers. He hesitated now no longer, but took up the attitude towards life in which he was to persist. His wonderful old grandfather at Capheaton encouraged him to adopt extreme views in politics, telling the lad how, in years long past, he had "repeatedly" made himself "liable to be impeached and executed for high treason" by the outspoken republicanism of his sentiments. The enthusiasm so engendered took a somewhat ludicrous shape in Algernon's private behaviour, for Mr. Lyulph Stanley (now Lord Sheffield), who entered Balliol College a little later than he, remembers that the poet had a portrait of Mazzini hanging in the place of honour in his sitting-room, and that he declaimed verses before it, with gestures of adoring supplication.

In all this advanced republicanism, if his grandfather encouraged him, he was still more actively abetted by John Nichol, who was pronounced disciple of Mazzini and loathed Napoleon III. Professor A. V. Dicey writes: "As regards Louis Napoleon we were all agreed. I see little reason to think that we were wrong in our general estimate of the Emperor; but there is something amusing, as I look back upon them, in the youthful vehemence of our denunciations." There was no support of Napoleon III. in the "Old Mortality," but Swinburne outdid all the rest in his fantastic violence. Professor Holland writes me: "I well recollect his dancing round the table, screaming abuse, and, I think, advocating the assassination of the Emperor."

Some of the verses that he intoned before the portrait may doubtless be identified with the Ode to Mazzini, found incomplete after Swinburne's death, and printed in 1909 by Mr. T. J. Wise. By internal evidence, this irregular Pindaric can be dated with confidence in the spring of 1857. It shows the influence of Shelley, but already there is a personal note of Swinburne in it, and some felicitous passages, such as:

The winds, that fold around

Her soft enchanted ground
Their wings of music, sadden into song;
The holy stars await

Some dawn of glimmering fate

In silence but the time of pain is long,

But here no comfort stills

This sorrow that o'erclouds the purple hills.

About the same time, doubtless through the help of Hatch, Swinburne appeared in print for the first time, contributing an article on Congreve to a popular dictionary. This, still more than the Ode to Mazzini, is stiff and rather dry; it gives no sort of promise of its author's coming affluence of phrase.

At the outset of the Long Vacation of 1857, William Morris, who had been in London for some months, reappeared in Oxford in connection with an ambitious artistic scheme. He visited the Brotherhood at Pembroke College, and Hatch presented Swinburne to him at Birkbeck Hill's rooms on the 1st of November. The artistic scheme was the decoration of the bays of the

1 Another MS., which supplied the missing passages, turned up in

Debating Room of the Union, which D. G. Rossetti had persuaded the architect, Benjamin Woodward, to entrust to himself and his friends. These included Burne-Jones and William Morris, who formed a triple alliance. It appears to have

been Hatch who introduced Swinburne to Rossetti and Burne-Jones while they were at work in the Union.1 The result was so happy that BurneJones exclaimed, "We have hitherto been three, and now there are four of us." No one whom Swinburne had ever met seemed to him so wonderful as Rossetti, and he enjoyed his "cordial kindness and exuberant generosity" from the first. But the difference in their ages, and a certain magnificence of manner on the part of Rossetti, kept Swinburne for the present at a respectful but increasingly adoring distance. His real intimacy with Rossetti did not begin until after he left Oxford. With Morris, to whose conversation Swinburne owed the opening of new fields of intellectual pleasure, and particularly an introduction to the romance of mediæval France, he was from the first on the footing of a devoted younger brother. He told Mr. S. C. Cockerell that when Morris read to him, in 1857, his just-written "The Haystack in the Floods,' the poignancy and splendour of the ending caused him an anguish which was more than his nerves were able to bear.

He was more at his ease at once with Dixon and Burne-Jones, although he was not invited

1 This incident has been related otherwise, and even by Mr. W. M. Rossetti; but I find among Swinburne's MSS. a note in which he says (November 27, 1886), “Rossetti did not know me through Burne-Jones'; I was introduced to them both at the same time."