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 one from another of the several occasions on which I heard him talk is difficult because the procedure was so invariable: Watts-Dunton always dictating when I arrived, Swinburne always appearing at the moment of the meal, always the same simple and substantial fare, Swinburne never allowed to talk before the meal was half over. As to this last point, I soon realised that I had been quite unjust in suspecting Watts-Dunton of selfishness. It was simply a sign of the care with which he watched over his friend’s welfare. Had Swinburne been admitted earlier to the talk, he would not have taken his proper quantity of roast mutton. So soon, always, as he had taken that, the embargo was removed, the chance was given him. And, swiftly though he embraced the chance, and much though he made of it in the courses of apple-pie and of cheese, he seemed touchingly ashamed of ‘holding forth.’ Often, before he had said his really full say on the theme suggested by Watts-Dunton’s loud interrogation, he would curb his speech and try to eliminate himself, bowing his head over his plate; and then, when he had promptly been brought in again, he would always try to atone for his inhibiting deafness by much reference and deference to all that we might otherwise have to say. ‘I hope,’ he would coo to me, ‘my friend Watts-Dunton, who’--and here he would turn and make a little bow to Watts-Dunton--‘is himself a scholar, will bear me out when I say’--or ‘I hardly know,’ he would flute to his old friend, ‘whether Mr. Beerbohm’--here a bow to me--‘will agree with me in my opinion of’ some delicate point in Greek prosody or some incident in an old French romance I had never heard of.