SOURCE: "1858-1861" and "1861-1866 (I)," in Monckton Milnes: The Flight of Youth, 1851-1885, Constable, 1951, pp. 108-26, 127-60.

In the following excerpt, Pope-Hennessy discusses the controversy over Milnes' collection of literary erotica and his influence on the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne.

In scope, Milnes' library was representative of European literature in the widest sense. Round a core of the great as well as the curious classics of the past, Milnes built up a collection of contemporary poetry, fiction, biography, history, memoirs and works of criticism in four languages. Aside from his big collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century autographs, Milnes formed the admirable practice of binding holograph letters, or fragments of manuscript verse, into the relevant books of his contemporaries. Thus we find a few lines in John Keats' handwriting bound into Milnes' Life, Letters and Literary Remains of that poet; some of Landor's letters bound into the first...