you for revision. Any alterations you may wish to make can be inserted in the proof.-Yours faithfully, WM. SMITH.

This was the first of many articles to appear in the Quarterly, and Dr Smith afterwards became one of his greatest friends and advisers.

W. E. Henley was about this time struggling for the recognition that was due to his talent, and in a letter to my father writes :

I am afraid that I am a futile and discomforting kind of protégé. The work I can get I can't do, and the work I could do I can't get. I exemplify in myself, do I not? that eternal unfitness of things about which certain of our own poets have so moaned.

Meanwhile he had met and married my mother, then Pauline Mary Strangways, only daughter of Thomas Henry Strangways1 and cousin of the Honourable H. B. Strangways,1 at whose fine old manor at Shapwick, Somerset, my father and

1 This branch of the Strangways family is descended from Sir James Strangways, the younger, and Elizabeth, the elder daughter and co-heir of Philip Darcy, sixth Lord Darcy de Knayth, and Lord Meinill. That family is also descended from the Barons Fauconberg through the marriage of Sir Richard Strangways and Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of William Nevill, Earl of Kent, and Joan Fauconberg, in her own right Baroness Fauconberg, a Barony which appears on the 1283 writ.

The connection with the Ilchester family is through the first Earl, Stephen Fox, who married in 1735 Elizabeth, only daughter

-1878

MARRIAGE

37

mother regularly spent part of their holiday every year-a visit which he always enjoyed and which did him much good.

and heir of Thomas Strangways Horner of Mells Park by his wife, Susannah, daughter and co-heir of Thomas Strangways of Melbury, Dorset.

It was in consequence of this marriage that the Earl of Ilchester assumed the name of Strangways.

66

CHAPTER III

1878-82

HIS 'COMMONPLACE" BOOK-AN EVENING WITH SWINBURNE-INTERVIEW WITH CARLYLE-IMPRESSION OF MILLAIS-AN EVENING AT SIR WILLIAM SMITH'S-SWINBURNE ON ANCIENT AND MODERN CLASSICS-INTERVIEW WITH ABRAHAM HAYWARD-LETTERS FROM SWINBURNE

I

66

SHALL now let my father's own memoirs speak for themselves. His habit was to jot them down in a big book-his commonplace book "-in any order, opening the volume at haphazard.

The first entry is dated 1878, but only refers to a consultation with Sir James Paget, the famous physician, and it is not till 1880 that a real beginning is made.

Had to-day, Saturday, Feb. 20th, 1880, an interview with Septimus Rivington the publisherhe was very keen for me to write a work for them. Offered £200 down and royalty for a History of Queen Anne's Reign to be in three or four volumes. Offered to publish any other book of mine and take the risk. I am getting on, I think.

About this time Swinburne moved into his new house and wrote him the following letter :