best poems of a considerable Balliol poet were published: he had
"gone down" some eight years before. Being young and green I eagerly
sought for traditions about Mr. Swinburne. One of his
contemporaries, who took a First in the final Classical Schools, told
me that "he was a smug." Another, that, as Mr. Swinburne and his
friend (later a Scotch professor) were not cricketers, they proposed
that they should combine to pay but a single subscription to the
Cricket Club. A third, a tutor of the highest reputation as a
moralist and metaphysician, merely smiled at my early enthusiasm,--
and told me nothing. A white-haired College servant said that "Mr.
Swinburne was a very quiet gentleman."

Then you take us to dirty illiterate Stratford, from fifty to eighty
years after Shakspere's death,--a Civil War and the Reign of the
Saints, a Restoration and a Revolution having intervened,--and ask us
to be surprised that no anecdotes of Shakspere's early brilliance, a
century before, survived at Stratford.

A very humble parallel may follow. Some foolish person went seeking
early anecdotes of myself at my native town, Selkirk on the Ettrick.
From an intelligent townsman he gathered much that was true and
interesting about my younger brothers, who delighted in horses and
dogs, hunted, shot, and fished, and played cricket; one of them
bowled for Gloucestershire and Oxford. But about me the inquiring
literary snipe only heard that "Andra was aye the stupid ane o' the
fam'ly." Yet, I, too, had bowled for the local club, non sine
gloria! Even THAT was forgotten.

Try to remember, best of men, that literary anecdotes of a fellow
townsman's youth do not dwell in the memories of his neighbours from