I need not reiterate the extraordinary influence that Baudelaire always had on Swinburne; seen most of all in _Poems and Ballads_ and recurring at intervals in later volumes of his verse. Both had in their genius, a certain abnormality, a certain perversity, a certain love of depravity in the highest sense of the word. Swinburne, who had a fashion of overpraising many writers, such as Hugo, so that his prose is often extravagant and the criticism as unbalanced as the praise, dedicated his finest book, "_William Blake_," to W. M. Rossetti, in words whose almost strained sense of humility--a way really in which he often showed the intensity of his pride--makes one wonder how he could have said: "I can but bring you brass for the gold you send me; but between equals and friends there can be no question of barter. Like Diomed, I take what I am given and offer what I have." What Swinburne had--his genius--he never gave away lavishly; here he is much too lavish. "There is a joy in praising" might have been written for him, and he communicates to us, as few writers do, his own sense of joy in beauty. It is quite possible to be annoyed by many of the things he has said, not only about literature, but also about religion, and morals and politics. But he has never said anything on any of these subjects which is not generous, and high-minded, and, at least for the moment, passionately and absolutely sincere. It is almost cruel to have to test one sentence of the man of talent with one sentence of the man of genius. I chose these from the _Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition_ they wrote together in 1868, which I have before me, in the form of a printed pamphlet. "If everybody tells me that the picture of A, of which this pamphlet says nothing, merits criticism, or that the picture of B, praised for color, claims praise on the score of drawing also, I shall have no difficulty in admitting the probable correctness of these remarks; but, if he adds that I am blamable for the omissions, I shall feel entitled to reply that A's picture and B's draughtsmanship were not and indeed never were in the bond."