match to ignite the Swinburnian tinder. `Well, Algernon, it seems that
"Cyrano de Bergerac"'--but this first spark was enough: instantly
Swinburne was praising the works of Cyrano de Bergerac. Of M. Rostand
he may have heard, but him he forgot. Indeed I never heard Swinburne
mention a single contemporary writer. His mind ranged and revelled
always in the illustrious or obscure past. To him the writings of
Cyrano de Bergerac were as fresh as paint--as fresh as to me, alas,
was the news of their survival. Of course, of course, you have read
"L'Histoire Comique des tats et des Empires de la Lune"?' I admitted,
by gesture and facial expression, that I had not. Whereupon he reeled
out curious extracts from that allegory--`almost as good as
"Gulliver"'--with a memorable instance of the way in which the
traveller to the moon was shocked by the conversation of the natives,
and the natives' sense of propriety was outraged by the conversation
of the traveller.

In life, as in (that for him more truly actual thing) literature, it
was always the preterit that enthralled him. Of any passing events, of
anything the newspapers were full of, never a word from him; and I
should have been sorry if there had been. But I did, through the
medium of Watts-Dunton, sometimes start him on topics that might have
led him to talk of Rossetti and other old comrades. For me the names
of those men breathed the magic of the past, just as it was breathed
for me by Swinburne's presence. For him, I suppose, they were but a
bit of the present, and the mere fact that they had dropped out of it
was not enough to hallow them. He never mentioned them. But I was glad
to see that he revelled as wistfully in the days just before his own
as I in the days just before mine. He recounted to us things he had
been told in his boyhood by an aged aunt, or great-aunt--`one of the
Ashburnhams'; how, for example, she had been taken by her mother to a