On one occasion, just before the removal of the mutton, Watts-Dunton had been asking me about an English translation that had been made of M. Rostand’s ‘Cyrano de Bergerac.’ He then took my information as the 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 états 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 county ball, a distance of many miles, and, on the way home through the frosty and snowy night, the family-coach had suddenly stopped: there was a crowd of dark figures in the way...at which point Swinburne stopped too, before saying, with an ineffable smile and in a voice faint with appreciation, ‘They were burying a suicide at the crossroads.’ Vivid as this Hogarthian night-scene was to me, I saw beside it another scene: a great panelled room, a grim old woman in a high-backed chair, and, restless on a stool at her feet an extraordinary little nephew with masses of auburn hair and with tiny hands clasped in supplication--‘Tell me more, Aunt Ashburnham, tell me more!’