I was in hopes that Mr. Gosse, who printed the letter in a short biographical sketch which he issued privately in 1912, would have done me the honour of including my notice in the larger book upon which he is engaged. He, however, very generously insists that I must take back my humble gift, and make it part of my sketch of Eton. It would be churlish to refuse to obey the behest of so good a friend, and so I append from my letter to him such extracts as seem to be to the point. But how proud should I have been had they appeared for the first time under his ægis! Swinburne entered Eton at the beginning of the summer half of 1849. His father the Admiral, a scion of the grand old Northumbrian family, and my aunt, Lady Jane, brought him, and at once sent for me to put him under my care. I was “to look after him.” It is true that I was only a few weeks older than himself, and so, physically, not much of a protector; but I had been three years at school, to which I was sent when I was nine years old, so I knew my Eton thoroughly, and was well versed in all its dear, delightful ways—mysteries bewildering to the uninitiated. I was already a little man of the world, at any rate of that microcosm which is a public school, and so I was able to steer my small cousin through some shoals. What a fragile little creature he seemed as he stood there between his father and mother with his wondering eyes fixed upon me! Under his arm he hugged his Bowdler’s Shakespeare, a very precious treasure bound in brown leather with, for a marker, a narrow slip of ribbon—blue I think—with a button of that most heathenish marqueterie called Tunbridge ware dangling from the end of it. He was strangely tiny. His limbs were small and delicate, and his sloping shoulders looked far too weak to carry his great head, the size of which was exaggerated by the tousled mass of red hair standing almost at right angles to it. Hero-worshippers talk of his hair as having been a “golden aureole.” At that time there was nothing golden about it. Red, violent, aggressive red it was, unmistakable red, burnished copper. His features were small and beautiful, chiselled as daintily as those of some Greek sculptor’s masterpiece. His skin was very white—not unhealthy, but a transparent tinted white such as one sees in the petals of some roses. His face was the very replica of that of his dear mother, and she was one of the most refined and lovely of women. What the colour of his eyes was I never knew—grey, green or brown, they reflected his mood and must have been of the same colour that his soul was at that moment; they could be soft and tender, blaze with rage, or sparkle with fire. His red hair must have come from the Admiral’s side, for I never heard of a red-haired Ashburnham. The Admiral himself, whom I rarely saw, was, so well as my memory serves me, already grizzled, but his hair must have been originally very fair or even red.