At the luncheon which followed our walk, Mr. Swinburne was present, and one could not help observing that in personal matters, as in his literary views, he seemed to be almost dependent on Mr. Watts-Dunton: he ran to him with a new book like a poetic child with a plaything. His amiability of manner and courtesy were charming; but his delicate face, quaint chanting voice, and restlessly twitching fingers, gave an impression of weakness. He talked, I remember, of Meredith’s _Sandra Belloni_ and _Diana of the Crossways_, and complained of their obscurity (“Can you construe them?”); then of his reminiscences of Eton, with friendly inquiries about my father-in-law, the Rev. J. L. Joynes, who had been his tutor and house-master; also about one of the French teachers, Mr. Henry Tarver, with whom he had been on very intimate terms. Here a few words on the poet’s adventures at Eton may not be out of place.[24] It is stated in Gosse’s Life of Swinburne that there is no truth in the legend that he was bullied at Eton; it is, however, a fact that his Eton career was not altogether an untroubled one. Mr. Joynes used to tell how Swinburne once came to him before school and begged to be allowed to “stay out,” because he was afraid to face some bigger boys who were temporarily attached to his Division--“those dreadful boys,” he called them. “Oh, sir, they wear tail coats! Sir, they are men!” The request was not granted; but his tutor soothed the boy by reading a Psalm with him, and thus fortified he underwent the ordeal. One very characteristic anecdote has unfortunately been told incorrectly. Lady Jane Swinburne had come to Eton to see her son, who was ill, and she read Shakespeare to him as he lay in bed. When she left him for a time, a maid, whom she had brought with her, was requested to continue the reading, and she did so, with the result that a glass of water which stood on a table by the bedside was presently dashed over her by the invalid. In the version quoted by his biographer the glass of water has become “a pot of jam”--quite wrongly, as I can testify, for I heard Mr. Joynes tell the story more than once. Swinburne was not allowed to read Byron or Shelley while he was at Eton. In Mr. Joynes’s house there was a set of volumes of the old English dramatists, and the young student urgently begged to be permitted to read these. “Might he read Ford?” To settle so difficult a question recourse was had to the advice of Mr. W. G. Cookesley, a master who was reputed “to know about everything”; and Mr. Cookesley’s judgment was that the boy might read all Ford’s plays except one--the one, of course, which has a title calculated to alarm. But this, it transpired, was one that he had specially wished to read!