He was the strangest figure in which the soul of a poet was ever housed. As a child he had been beautiful, but something must have gone wrong with his glands, so that his head grew faster than his body. He developed a noble brow, but a weak mouth and receding chin; his enormous head was lighted by two bright green eyes, and covered with a shock of vivid red hair. When he became excited, which he was liable to do at a moment’s notice, his arms and legs began to jerk convulsively, and he would rush about the room, orating vehemently, perhaps hopping upon the sofa, like a bright-colored parrakeet. He was an omnivorous reader, and knew all the poetry there was in the world--most of it by heart, and would pour it out by the hour, in Latin, Greek, French, Italian or English. If he became too much excited, he would suddenly have a fit and fall unconscious, to the terror of the company; but after a while he would come to, just as lively and full of words as ever. In his childhood and youth, according to the English custom, they filled him up with Greek and Latin verses; he absorbed the bad as well as the good, wine and women as well as song. Then he came under the spell of Victor Hugo, who filled him with a fervor for liberty. It is an interesting illustration of the influence a great poet can exert. Swinburne worshipped Hugo with frenzied extravagance, and remained a disciple of republicanism all through his seventy-two years; and this without the slightest actual contact with republicanism, without anything in his environment or his actions to explain such revolutionary fever. Worldly impracticability was carried to its last extreme in this combustible youth; he always had to have somebody to take care of him, and fell under the spell of one personality after another: Rossetti, William Morris, Mazzini, and finally Watts-Dunton, who literally saved his life. Swinburne would come up to London and engage in what he called “racketing”--by which he meant stimulating his frenzies with alcohol. He would keep this up until he was completely prostrated, and then his father or one of his friends would carry him off to the country and mount guard over him, and there he would live a quiet and placid literary life until the world lured him forth again. By the time he was forty he had carried his dissipation to such extremes that he was all but wrecked. One by one his friends had to give him up, and he was living in wretched lodgings at the point of death.