Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/472

 writing 'Hohenstiel-Schwangau.' Browning was staying near by, and often joined the party. Swinburne, much recovered in health, was in delightful spirits; like Jowett, he was ardently on the side of France. In September he went off for a prolonged walking-tour through the highlands of Scotland, and returned in splendid condition. The life of London, however, was always bad for him, and in October he was seriously ill again; in November he visited George Meredith at Kingston. He was now mixed up in much violent polemic with Robert Buchanan and others; early in 1872 he published the most effective of all his satirical writings, the pungent 'Under the Microscope' [see under, Suppl. II]. He had written the first act of 'Bothwell,' which F. Locker-Lampson set up in type for him; this play, however, was not finished for several years. His intercourse with D. G. Rossetti had now ceased; his acquaintance with Mr. Theodore Watts (afterwards Watts-Dunton) began. In July and August of this year he was again staying at Tummel Bridge with Jowett, and once more he was the life and soul of the party, enlivening the evenings with paradoxes and hyperboles and recitations of Mrs. Gamp. Jowett here persuaded Swinburne to join him in revising the 'Children's Bible' of J. D. Rogers, which was published the following summer. In May 1873 the violence of Swinburne's attacks on Napoleon III (who was now dead) led to a remarkable controversy in the 'Examiner' and the 'Spectator.' Swinburne had given up his rooms in Dorset Street, and lodged for a short time at 12 North Crescent, Alfred Place, whence he moved, in September 1873, to rooms at 3 Great James Street, where he continued to reside until he left London for good. Meanwhile he spent some autumn weeks with Jowett at Grantown, Elginshire. During this year he was busily engaged in writing 'Bothwell,' to which he put the finishing touches in February 1874, and published some months later.

The greater part of January 1874 he spent with Jowett at the Land's End. Between March and September he was in the country, first at Holmwood, afterwards at Niton in the Isle of Wight. In April 1874 he was put, without his consent, and to his great indignation, on the Byron Memorial Committee. He was at this time chiefly devoting himself to the Elizabethan dramatists; an edition, with critical introduction, of Cyril Tourneur had been projected at the end of 1872, but had been abandoned; but the volume on 'George Chapman' was issued, in two forms, in December 1874. This winter was spent at Holmwood, whence in February 1875 Swinburne issued his introduction to the reprint of Wells's 'Joseph and his Brethren.' From early in June until late in October he was out of London — at Holmwood; visiting Jowett at West Malvern, where he sketched the first outline of 'Erechtheus'; and in apartments, Middle Cliff, Wangford, near Southwold, in Suffolk. His monograph on 'Auguste Vacquerie,' in French, was published in Paris in November 1875; the English version appeared in the 'Miscellanies' of 1886. Two volumes of reprinted matter belong to this year, 1876: in prose 'Essays and Studies,' in verse 'Songs of Two Nations'; and a pseudonymous pamphlet, attacking Buchanan, entitled 'The Devil's Due.' Most of 1876 was spent at Holmwood, with brief and often untoward visits to London. In July he was poisoned by lilies with which a too enthusiastic hostess had filled his bedroom, and he did not completely recover until November. In the winter of this year appeared 'Erechtheus' and 'A Note on the Muscovite Crusade,' and in December was written 'The Ballad of Bulgarie,' first printed as a pamphlet in 1893. Admiral Swinburne, his father, died on 4 March 1877. The poet sent his 'Charlotte Bronte' to press in June, and then left town for the rest of the year, which he spent at Holmwood and again at Wangford, where he occupied himself in translating the poems of François Villon. He also issued, in a weekly periodical, his unique novel entitled 'A Year's Letters,' which he did not republish until 1905, when it appeared as 'Love's Cross-currents.' In April 1878 Victor Hugo talked of addressing a poem of invitation to Swinburne, and a committee invited the latter to Paris in May to be present as the representative of English poetry at the centenary of the death of Voltaire; but the condition of his health, which was deplorable during this year and the next, forbade his acceptance. In 1878 his chief publication was 'Poems and Ballads (Second Series).'

Swinburne's state became so alarming that in September 1879 Mr. Theodore Watts, with the consent of Lady Jane Swinburne, removed him from 3 Great James Street to his own house, The Pines, Putney, where the remaining thirty years of his life were spent, in great retirement but with health slowly and completely restored. Under the guardianship of his