Algernon Charles Swinburne

In 1862 Henry Adams was a guest of Monckton Milnes at Fryston : Laurence Oliphant, Sterling of Keir will not detain us, although we owe to the future Sir William Sterling-Maxwell a definition worthy to rank with Max Beerbohm’s visit to The Pines, Putney, and with George Meredith’s Daumier lithograph of Theodore Watts Dunton.‘The fourth [man] was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a year older than Adams himself. He resembled in action—and in this trait was remotely followed, a generation later, by another famous young man, Robert Louis Stevenson—a tropical bird, high-crested, long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterance and screams of humour, quite unlike any English lark or nightingale. One could hardly call him a crimson macaw among owls, and yet no ordinary contrast availed. Milnes introduced him as Mr. Algernon Swinburne. The name suggested nothing. Milnes was always unearthing new coins and trying to give them currency .... Conversation ran first to Oliphant who told his dramatic story simply, and from him the talk drifted off into other channels, until Milnes thought it time to bring Swinburne out . . . F or the rest of the evening Swinburne figured alone; the end of dinner made the monologue only freer, for in 1862, even when ladies were not in the house, smoking was forbidden, and guests usually smoked in the stables or the kitchen; but Monckton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his guests smoke in Adams’s bedroom, since Adams was an American-German barbarian ignorant of manners;