The story of his first day as a
member of Professor Stubbs's household was professionally clever
farce, if not high comedy, in a young man who could write a Greek
ode or a Proven‡al chanson as easily as an English quatrain.
Late at night when the symposium broke up, Stirling of Keir
wanted to take with him to his chamber a copy of "Queen
Rosamund," the only volume Swinburne had then published, which
was on the library table, and Adams offered to light him down
with his solitary bedroom candle. All the way, Stirling was
ejaculating explosions of wonder, until at length, at the foot of
the stairs and at the climax of his imagination, he paused, and
burst out: "He's a cross between the devil and the Duke of
Argyll!"
To appreciate the full merit of this description, a judicious
critic should have known both, and Henry Adams knew only one --
at least in person -- but he understood that to a Scotchman the
likeness meant something quite portentous, beyond English
experience, supernatural, and what the French call moyenageux, or
mediaeval with a grotesque turn. That Stirling as well as Milnes
should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who
lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imagine that
Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford, as muffins and
pork-pies of London, at once the cause and effect of dyspepsia.
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