among the genuine poets of liberty.  He loved insurrectionism for its own sake.  He revelled in it in the spirit of a rhetorician rather than of a martyr.  He was a glorious humbug, a sort of inverted Pecksniff.  Even his republicanism cannot have gone very deep if it is true, as certain of his editors declare, that having been born within the precincts of Belgravia “was an event not entirely displeasing to a man of his aristocratic leanings.”  Swinburne, it seems, was easily pleased.  One of his proudest boasts was that he and Victor Hugo bore a close resemblance to each other in one respect:  both of them were almost dead when they were born, “certainly not expected to live an hour.”  There was also one great difference between them.  Swinburne never grew up.

His letters, some of which Messrs. Hake and Compton Rickett have given us, are interesting and amusing, but they do not increase one’s opinion of Swinburne’s mind.  He reveals himself as a sensitive critic in his remarks on the proofs of Rossetti’s poems, in his comments on Morris, and in his references to Tennyson’s dramas.  But, as a rule, his intemperance of praise and blame makes his judgments appear mere eccentricities of the blood.  He could not praise Falstaff, for instance, without speaking of “the ever dear and honoured presence of Falstaff,” and applauding the “sweet, sound, ripe toothsome, wholesome kernel” of Falstaff’s character as well as humour.  He even defied the opinion of his idol, Victor Hugo, and contended that Falstaff was not really a coward.  All the world will agree that Swinburne was right in glorifying Falstaff.  He glorified him, however, on the wrong plane.  He mixed his planes in the same way in his paean over Captain Webb’s feat in swimming the English Channel.  “I consider it,” he said, “as the greatest glory that has befallen England since the publication of Shelley’s greatest poem, whatever that may have been.”  This is shouting, not speech.  But then, as I have said, Swinburne never grew up.  He never learned to speak.  He was ever a shouter.  The question that has so far not been settled is:  Did Watts-Dunton put his hand over Swinburne’s mouth and forcibly stop him from shouting?  As we know, he certainly stopped him from swearing before ladies, except in French.  But, as for shouting, Swinburne had already exhausted himself when he went to the Pines.  Meanwhile, questions of this sort have begun to absorb us to such a degree that we are apt to forget that Swinburne after all was a man of genius—­a man with an entrancing gift of melody—­spiritually an echo, perhaps, but aesthetically a discoverer, a new creature, the most amazing ecstatician of our time.

2.  GENIUS WITHOUT EYES