As a proof of my readiness to accept biographical convention, let me at once record my two earliest recollections. The first is being held up to the window to watch a carnival procession for the Diamond Jubilee in 1897 (this was at Wimbledon, where I had been born on 24th July 1895). The second, an earlier recollection still, is looking up with a sort of despondent terror at a cupboard in the nursery, which stood accidentally open and which was filled to the ceiling with octavo volumes of Shakespeare. My father was organiser of a Shakespeare reading circle. I did not know until long afterwards that it was the Shakespeare cupboard, but I, apparently, had then a strong instinct against drawing-room activities. It is only recently that I have overcome my education and gone back to this early intuitional spontaneousness. When distinguished visitors came to the house, like Sir Sidney Lee with his Shakespearean scholarship, and Lord Ashbourne, not yet a peer, with his loud talk of ‘Ireland for the Irish,’ and his saffron kilt, and Mr. Eustace Miles with his samples of edible nuts, I knew all about them in my way. I had summed up correctly and finally my Uncle Charles of the _Spectator_ and _Punch_, and my Aunt Grace, who came in a carriage and pair, and whose arrival always caused a flutter because she was Lady Pontifex, and all the rest of my relations. And I had no illusions about Algernon Charles Swinburne, who often used to stop my perambulator when he met it on Nurses’ Walk, at the edge of Wimbledon Common, and pat me on the head and kiss me; he was an inveterate pram-stopper and patter and kisser. Nurses’ Walk lay between ‘The Pines,’ Putney (where he lived with Watts-Dunton) and the Rose and Crown public-house, where he went for his daily pint of beer; Watts-Dunton allowed him twopence for that and no more. I did not know that Swinburne was a poet, but I knew that he was no good. Swinburne, by the way, when a very young man, went to Walter Savage Landor, then a very old man, and asked for and was given a poet’s blessing; and Landor when a child had been patted on the head by Dr. Samuel Johnson; and Johnson when a child had been taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne for scrofula, the King’s evil; and Queen Anne when a child....