His memory was wonderful, his power of quotation almost unlimited. We used to take long walks together in Windsor Forest and in the Home Park, where the famous oak of Herne the Hunter was still standing, a white, lightning-blasted skeleton of a tree, a fitting haunt for “fairies black, grey, green and white,” and a very favourite goal of our expeditions. As he walked with his peculiar dancing gait, tripping along like a young faun, his eyes gleaming with enthusiasm, his whole body quivering with excitement, and his hair, like the _zazzera_ of his own beloved old Florentines, tossed about by the wind, he would pour out with that unforgettable voice of his the treasures which he had gathered at his last sitting in his favourite window-nook. Other boys would watch him with amazement, looking upon him as a sort of inspired elfin—a changeling from another sphere. None dreamt of interfering with him, and as for bullying, there was none of it. He carried with him one magic charm—he was absolutely brave. He did not know what fear meant. It is generally the coward, the weakling in character, far more than the weakling in thews and sinews, that is bullied. Swinburne’s pluck as a boy always reminds me of Kinglake’s description in “Eothen” of Dr. Keate, the famous Head Master of Eton: “He was little more (if more at all) than five feet in height, and was not very great in girth, but within this space was concentrated the pluck of ten battalions.” That might have been written of Swinburne, and tiny as he was, I verily believe that had any boy, however big, attempted to bully him, that boy would have caught a Tartar. Of games he took no heed—they were not for his frail build; football and cricket were nothing to him. I do not think that he ever possessed a cricket bat; but he could swim like any frog and of walking he never tired. And so he led a sort of charmed life, dreaming and reading, and chewing the cud of his gleanings from the world-harvest of poetry, a fairy child in the midst of a commonplace, workaday world—as Horace said of himself, “non sine Dîs animosus infans.” I have spoken of his courage. He was no horseman, and had but little opportunity at home for riding, but in the matter of horses he was absolutely without terror. Unskilled as he was, he would back anything, as fearless as a centaur. As a boy, rides with his cousin, Lady Katherine Ashburnham, were among his great delights in that glorious, forest-like country about Ashburnham Place. My uncle, the great book-lover, had an instinctive appreciation of his genius long before he was famous, and always had a welcome for him.