Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/114

 "Let me sum up briefly the chief stages in this miserable, and in some aspects disgraceful, affair, i. Mr. Buchanan, whether anonymously or pseudonymously—being a poet, veritable or reputed—attacked another poet, a year and a half after the works of the latter had been received with general and high applause. 2. He attacked him on grounds partly literary, but more prominently moral. 3. After he had had every opportunity for reflection, he repeated the attack in a greatly aggravated form. 4. At a later date he knew that the author in question was not a bad poet, nor a poet with an immoral purpose. The question naturally arises—If he knew this in or before 1881, why did he know or suppose the exact contrary in 1871 and 1872? Here is a question to which no answer (within my cognizance) has ever been given by Mr. Buchanan, and it is one to which some readers may risk their own reply. That is their affair. If Mr. Robert Buchanan concludes that Mr. Thomas Maitland told an untruth, it is not for me to say him nay." Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti, 2 vols, octavo, London, 1895. Vol. I, p. 301.

Let us close this old unhappy subject by reprinting the dedication prefixed to Buchanan's romance of God and the Man (1881):

I would have snatched a bay-leaf from thy brow, Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head; In peace and charity I bring thee now A lily-flower instead.