My next meeting with Swinburne took place not many days later. He had managed meanwhile to make acquaintance with a few other undergraduates--all of them enthusiastic worshipers--one of whom arranged to entertain him at luncheon. As I could not, being otherwise engaged, be present at this feast myself, I was asked to join the party as soon as possible afterward. I arrived at a fortunate moment. Most of the guests were still sitting at a table covered with dessert dishes. Swinburne was much at his ease in an armchair near the fireplace, and was just beginning, as a number of smiling faces showed, to be not only interesting, but in some way entertaining also. He was, as I presently gathered, about to begin an account of a historical drama by himself, which existed in his memory only--a sort of parody of what Victor Hugo might have written had he dramatized English events at the opening of the reign of Queen Victoria. The first act, he said, showed England on the verge of a revolution, which was due to the frightful orgies of the Queen at "Buckingham's Palace." The Queen, with unblushing effrontery, had taken to herself a lover, in the person of Lord John Russell, who had for his rival "Sir Peel." Sir Peel was represented as pleading his own cause in a passionate scene, which wound up as follows: "Why do you love Lord John Russell, and why do you not love me? I know why you love Lord John Russell. He is young, he is beautiful, he is profligate. I cannot be young, I cannot be beautiful, but I will be profligate." Then followed the stage direction, "Exit for ze Haysmarket." In a later act it appeared that the Queen and Lord John Russell had between them given the world a daughter, who, having been left to her own devices, or, in other words, to the streets, reappears as "Miss Kitty," and is accorded some respectable rank. Under these conditions she becomes the object of much princely devotion; but the moral hypocrisy of England has branded her as a public scandal. With regard to her so-called depravities nobody entertains a doubt, but one princely admirer, of broader mind than the rest, declares that in spite of these she is really the embodiment of everything that is divine in woman. "She may," he says, "have done everything which might have made a Messalina blush, but whenever she looked at the sky she murmured 'God,' and whenever she looked at a flower she murmured 'mother.'"