So many of Swinburne's MSS. have been preserved, principally in the newspaper bundles which he so oddly carried with him, without ever examining, through all his peregrinations from Oxford to Putney, that it is particularly vexatious that those which we could least afford to spare, those of his blossoming period from 1861 to 1868, are very exiguously represented. No scrap of _The Queen Mother_ has turned up, nor of the published form of _Rosamond_ (an undergraduate sketch of this play remains). The original MS. of _Chastelard_ exists only in a few fragments, the MS. sold in New York in 1913 being a clean copy for the press. According to the evidence of George Meredith, the first draft of _Laus Veneris_ was written in red ink; the existing version, though containing corrections and cancelled passages, is written in black ink, and shows no sign of the frenzy of composition; it is evidently a transcript. Of _Poems and Ballads_ no general MS. exists, but portions of the "copy" sent to the printers are in various collections. Most of these are transcripts, and show no sign of emotion or excitement. Several first drafts of _Poems and Ballads_, however, have been preserved, and of these the most remarkable that I have examined is that of _Anactoria_, of which I will now give some account. Swinburne's first drafts offer none of the attractions which collectors of autographs commonly desiderate. They are never signed and rarely headed. That of the long poem afterwards called _Anactoria_ has neither a title nor the Greek epigraph from Sappho. It is written, or rather wildly scribbled, on both sides of six sheets of blue foolscap, the water-mark of one of which is 1863, doubtless the date of the composition of the poem. These sheets were thrown away, and came into our hands in a great disorder of papers, mostly worthless, which left The Pines after Watts-Dunton's death. As we turned them over, in the welter of manuscript, my eye caught the line Lilies, and languor of the Lesbian air, and I realized what lay before us. Scattered through the bundle, five sheets were identified, but unfortunately one sheet was missing. By a happy chance, this also turned up in another parcel three years later, and the first draft is now, I believe, complete, although one passage in the published poem, as I shall presently show, is absent. The text begins high up on the first sheet, and offers no peculiarity in the opening eight lines, which, with the slight exception of "Sting" instead of "Blind" in line 2, are identical with the published version of 1866. The handwriting is the usual script of Swinburne in the 60's, crabbed, but plain and calm. Suddenly, with line 7, a sort of frenzy takes the poet's pen, and at the side of the paper, in lines that slope more and more rapidly downwards, and in such a stumbling and trembling hand that they are with great difficulty to be spelt out, are interpolated the lines: