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