lity to mar the
music; but it didn't; save that now and again a note would come out
metallic and over-shrill, the tones were under good control. The whole
manner and method had certainly a strong element of oddness; but no one
incapable of condemning as unmanly the song of a lark would have called
it affected. I had met young men of whose enunciation Swinburne's now
reminded me. In them the thing had always irritated me very much; and I
now became sure that it had been derived from people who had derived it
in old Balliol days from Swinburne himself. One of the points familiar
to me in such enunciation was the habit of stressing extremely, and
lackadaisically dwelling on, some particular syllable. In Swinburne
this trick was delightful--because it wasn't a trick, but a need of his
heart. Well do I remember his ecstasy of emphasis and immensity of pause
when he described how he had seen in a perambulator on the Heath to-day
'the most BEAUT--iful babbie ever beheld by mortal eyes.' For babies,
as some of his later volumes testify, he had a sort of idolatry. After
Mazzini had followed Landor to Elysium, and Victor Hugo had followed
Mazzini, babies were what among live creatures most evoked Swinburne's
genius for self-abasement. His rapture about this especial 'babbie' was
such as to shake within me my hitherto firm conviction that, whereas
the young of the brute creation are already beautiful at the age of five
minutes, the human young never begin to be so before the age of three
years. I suspect Watts-Dunton of having shared my lack of innate
enthusiasm. But it was one of Swinburne's charms, as I was to find, that
he took for granted every one's delight in what he himself so fervidly
delighted in. He could as soon have imagined a man not loving the very
sea as not doting on the aspect of babies and not reading at least one
play by an Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatist every day.

I forget whether it was at this my first meal or at another that he
described a storm in which, one night years ago, with Watts-Dunton,
he had crossed the Channel. The rhythm of his great phrases was as the
rhythm of those waves, and his head swayed in accordance to it like the
wave-rocked boat itself. He hymned in memory the surge and darkness,
the thunder and foam and phosphorescence--'You remember, Theodore? You
remember the PHOS--phorescence?'--all so beautifully and vividly that I
almost felt stormbound and in peril of my life. To disentangle