rtually--though not
so definitely as in fact he was--the writer of 'Atalanta in Calydon' and
of 'Poems and Ballads.'

Tennyson's death in '98 had not taken us at all by surprise. We had
been fully aware that he was alive. He had always been careful to keep
himself abreast of the times. Anything that came along--the Nebular
Hypothesis at one moment, the Imperial Institute at another--won mention
from his Muse. He had husbanded for his old age that which he had long
ago inherited: middle age. If in our mourning for him there really was
any tincture of surprise, this was due to merely the vague sense that
he had in the fullness of time died rather prematurely: his middle-age
might have been expected to go on flourishing for ever. But assuredly
Tennyson dead laid no such strain on our fancy as Swinburne living.

It is true that Swinburne did, from time to time, take public notice
of current affairs; but what notice he took did but seem to mark his
remoteness from them, from us. The Boers, I remember, were the theme of
a sonnet which embarrassed even their angriest enemies in our midst.
He likened them, if I remember rightly, to 'hell-hounds foaming at the
jaws.' This was by some people taken as a sign that he had fallen away
from that high generosity of spirit which had once been his. To me it
meant merely that he thought of poor little England writhing under the
heel of an alien despotism, just as, in the days when he really was
interested in such matters, poor little Italy had writhen. I suspect,
too, that the first impulse to write about the Boers came not from the
Muse within, but from Theodore Watts-Dunton without.... 'Now, Algernon,
we're at war, you know--at war with the Boers. I don't want to bother
you at all, but I do think, my dear old friend, you oughtn't to let slip
this opportunity of,' etc., etc.

Some such hortation is easily imaginable by any one who saw the two
old friends together. The first time I had this honour, this sight for
lasting and affectionate memory, must have been in the Spring of '99. In
those days Theodore Watts (he had but recently taken on the Dunton) was
still something of a gad-about. I had met him here and there, he had
said in his stentorian tones pleasant things to me about my writing, I
sent him a new little book of mine, and in acknowledging this he asked
me to come down to Putney and 'have luncheon and meet Swinburne.' Meet
Catullus!

On the day appointed 'I came as one whose