In regard to _Laus Veneris_, I turn for a moment to W. M. Rossetti's _Swinburne's Poems and Ballads: A criticism_ (1866) which, on the whole, is uncommonly well written, to one of those passages where he betrays a kind of Puritanism in his Italian blood; saying that the opening lines were, apart from any question of sentiment, much overdone. "That is a situation (and there are many such in Swinburne's writings) which we would much rather see touched off with the reticence of a Tennyson: he would probably have given one epithet, or, at the utmost, one line, to it, and it would at least equally have haunted the memory." I turn from this to Swinburne on Tennyson, as for instance: "At times, of course, his song was then as sweet as ever it has sounded since; but he could never make sure of singing right for more than a few minutes or stanzas." And--what is certainly true--that Vivien's impurity is eclipsed by her incredible and incomparable vulgarity. "She is such a sordid creature as plucks men passing by the sleeve." Now the actual origin of _Laus Veneris_ came about when Swinburne, with Rossetti, bought the first edition of Fitzgerald's wonderful version of _Omar Khayyam._ "We invested," Swinburne writes, "in hardly less than six-penny-worth apiece, and on returning to the stall next day, for more, found that we had sent up the market to the sinfully extravagant price of two-pence, an imposition which evoked from Rossetti a fervent and impressive remonstrance." Swinburne went down to stay with Meredith in the country with the priceless book; and, before lunch, they read, alternately, stanza after stanza. The result was that, after lunch, Swinburne went to his room and came down to Meredith's study with his invariable blue paper and wrote there and then thirteen stanzas of _Veneris_, that end with the lines: Till when the spool is finished, lo I see His web, reeled off, curls and goes out like steam. His only invention was the certainly cunning one of inserting a rhyme after the second line of each stanza, which is not in the version. Swinburne's re-creation of the immortal legend of Venus and her Knight, certainly--though certainly unknown to W. M. Rossetti--owes also much of its origin from Swinburne's inordinate admiration of _Les Fleurs du Mal_, by Baudelaire. Its origin, in a certain sense only; that is of the influence of one poet on the other. For, as he says: It was not till my poem was completed that I received from the hands of its author the admirable pamphlet of Charles Baudelaire on Wagner's _Tannhauser._ If anyone desires to see, expressed in better words than I can command, the conception of the mediæval Venus which it was my aim to put into verse, let him turn to the magnificent passage in which Baudelaire describes the fallen goddess, grown diabolic among eyes that would not accept her as divine.