It had been my good fortune the night before to take in Mrs. Lynn Linton to dinner at the beautiful and hospitable home of Sir Bruce and Lady Seton at Chelsea, and Mrs. Lynn Linton and I had talked much of Ireland. Mentioning this to Swinburne, he said that he had once written to Mrs. Lynn Linton remonstrating violently with her about an article of hers on Ireland, and he had reason to believe that his words had not been without effect, as, since then, Mrs. Lynn Linton had come to think as he had on that question, and was of opinion that Gladstone, Morley and Harcourt ought to have been impeached for high treason. Reverting to books, he said that nothing so beautiful about Ireland had been written as the Hon. Emily Lawless’s novel _Grania_, then fresh from the press. He had bought a number of copies to send to his own friends, as well as some to send to his aunt, Lady Mary Gordon, for distribution in her circle. He went on to say that his old friend, Dr. Whitley Stokes, had shown him some of the Irish songs which were sung to the tunes to which Tom Moore afterwards wrote his “mawkish and sentimental songs.” One of these, Swinburne said, had since been reprinted in the _Academy_. “And as poetry I can only compare it to the Book of Job--and what more superlatively splendid praise can I offer than that?” Here Watts-Dunton put in a word for Wales and incidentally for Scotland, which reminds me that I ought to say that Watts-Dunton’s share in this, and in other conversations, was no less interesting, though less erratic and more considered than Swinburne’s. Switched off thus from Ireland to Scotland, Swinburne launched out into enthusiastic praise of the islands of Rum and Eig, the nomenclature of which, he said, was phonetically and fatally suggestive of a nourishing, if nauseous drink, not to be despised, he understood, after an early morning swim, and declared that the one thing which made him regret he was not a man of wealth was that he could not afford to yield to the desire of his heart, and spend half his time cruising in a yacht around the western islands of Scotland. V Perhaps the most treasured possession on my bookshelves is a volume in which Swinburne has inscribed my name and his own. The volume in question is his _Studies in Prose and Poetry_, and as, among the contents, there is an article devoted entirely to a consideration of the merits and defects of _Lyra Elegantiarum_, in the editorial work of the last edition of which it was my honour and privilege to collaborate with the original compiler, the late Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, I may perhaps be pardoned for referring to it here. The fact that Swinburne was making _Lyra Elegantiarum_ the subject of an important article (it appeared first in the _Forum_) was told to me when I was lunching one day at The Pines, and naturally I carried the news of the compliment which his book was to receive to Mr. Locker-Lampson.