Catholic communion under the influence of Joseph de Maistre in November 1815, and settled in France about the end of 1816, dying at Paris in 1857. For about forty years she maintained at Paris a famous salon, characterised by the remarkable peculiarity of a distinctly theological bias. Her husband, General Swetchine, was a quiet, inoffensive man, twenty-five years her senior; she herself was small and plain, with a Calmuck nose and ill-matched eyes; yet she possessed a spiritual beauty and a charm of personality of altogether unusual kind. Her passionate nature had early found safety and perhaps happiness in rigidity of principle and an austere love of heaven; she never had a child; and almost from youth until the end her life was marked with more than the enthusiasm of the convert. Yet she tempered the ardour of zealous and propagandist orthodoxy with all the courtesy of the great world. The church had granted her the rare indulgence of a private chapel in her house, and from the dialectic play of intellect in the salon she passed easily to rapt worship and spiritual communion with God. Her letters and writings, such as those on Old Age and Resignation, show subtle thought and elevation of tone, if scarcely distinction of style, but lack the peculiar charm that belonged to her personality, and scarcely justify the enthusiasm of her group of friends whose admiration soon passed into worship.

See M. de Falloux, Madame Swetchine, sa Vie et ses Euvres (2 vols. 1860), and her Lettres, by the same editor (2 vols. 1861); also Sainte-Beuve, in Nouveaux Lundis, vol. i., and E. Scherer, in Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine, vol. i.

Swietenia. See MAHOGANY.

Swift, a genus (Cypselus) and family (Cypselida) of Picarian birds, resembling the swallows in general appearance and habits, but most closely allied by anatomical structure to the humming. birds. They may be distinguished by external characters from swallows thus: the swifts have ten primaries, not more than seven secondaries, and only ten tail-feathers, while the swallows have but nine primaries, at least nine secondaries, and twelve tail-feathers.' They have long pointed wings, a short tail, and possess remarkable powers of rapid and prolonged flight. The bill is short, depressed, and weak; the gape wide and fringed by bristles. The legs and toes are short and weak. In distribution the swifts are almost cosmopolitan, but are absent from New Zealand. Two groups are recognised, (a) the Micropodinæ, or true swifts, with the first toe directed more or less forwards, and a reduced number of phalanges in the third and fourth toes, and (b) the Chaturinæ, with the first toe directed backwards and the normal number of phalanges in the third and fourth toes. The Common Swift (Cypselus apus) is common in almost all parts of the north of Europe and Asia in summer, retiring to tropical or subtropical regions in winter, extending its migrations to the extreme south of Africa. It occurs even in Lapland. Its residence in its summer quarters is much shorter than that of swallows; and it is worthy of notice that the swift is seldom to be seen along with any of the swallows or martins, the different kinds choosing different localities, even although very close together. The swift is easily recognised in its flight by the remarkably sickle-shaped wings, and its slight scream is very different from the twitter of the swallow. It is bronzed blackish brown, with a white throat; bill, toes, and claws black. It makes its nest in holes in rocks and walls, often in the thatch of houses, crevices in sea-cliffs, quarries, chalk-pits, and trees. The nest is formed of bits of straw, dry blades of grass and bents, feathers, and other such substances,

which are apparently glued together by a viscid secretion. The eggs are two in number, and as a rule only one brood is hatched in a season. The swift, like the swallow, seems to return to the same place to nest year after year, and repairs the old nest instead of making a new one. Sometimes it robs martins, sparrows, and even starlings of their nests. Its chief food consists of insects, and the undigested remains are ejected in the form of pellets. The Alpine Swift, or White-bellied

Common Swift (Cypselus apus).

Swift (C. alpinus), is rarely seen in Britain, but is common in summer on all the high mountainranges of southern and central Europe. Eastwards it ranges through Asia Minor and Persia to many parts of India and Ceylon. It is supposed to breed in the extreme south of Africa, where it is common. It builds in high rocks, sometimes in steeples, notably in the cathedral at Bern. It is larger than the common swift, and has a louder note and flies more powerfully. The Needle-tailed Swift (Acanthylis caudacuta), an Asiatic species, has been twice found in England, each time in the month of July, but nowhere else in Europe. It is common during summer in south-eastern Siberia, Mongolia, Japan, China, and Tibet; while in winter it migrates as far south as to Eastern Australia and Tasmania. The American Swift (Chatura pelagica) has the hind-toe directed backwards, and the tail-feathers stiff and pointed, as in woodpeckers. It is a small bird, not above 43 inches in entire length, but one foot in extent of wing. The general colour is brownish black, with greenish reflections, the throat grayish white, the under parts grayish brown. The nest is made of small dry twigs, which the bird breaks off from the tree, and carries away in its feet; and they are attached by means of a viscid secretion to the rock, wall, or hollow tree where the nest is made. From its frequently building in chimneys this species is known as the Chimney-swift in North America, where it is a regular migrant in many parts, wintering in Mexico. Great numbers often build together, sometimes choosing for this purpose an unused chimney in a town. The Swiftlets, genus Collocalia, found from India to the Malay Archipelago and in many of the Polynesian islands, one species even in Madagascar, are the builders of Edible Nests (q.v.). They breed in deep caves and fix their gelatinous-looking nests, made of mucus unmixed with any vegetable product, to the walls. The nest of one of the true swifts (Panyptila sancti hieronymi) discovered in

.

Guatemala is perhaps still more remarkable, being composed entirely of the seeds of a plant secured together and hung from the under surface of an overhanging rock by the saliva of the bird. The whole forms a tube 2 feet 2 inches long by about 6 inches in diameter. The entrance is through the lower end of the tube, and the eggs are placed on a shelf at the top. About the middle of the tube, on the external side, is a protruding eave as if overvaulting an entrance; but there is no hole, and it has the appearance as if it was placed there on purpose in order to deceive some enemy, such as a snake or lizard,' especially during the period of incubation. The Palm Swift of Jamaica (Micropus phonicobia) is also a remarkable nestbuilder, attaching its nest of feathers and silkcotton, felted together, to the surface of a spathe or of a leaf by means of its salivary secretion.

Swift, JONATHAN, Dean of St Patrick's, and the greatest of English prose satirists, came of a Yorkshire clerical family on his Copyright 1892 in U.S. father Jonathan's side, while his by J. B. Lippincott mother Company. was Abigail Erick of Leicestershire. He was thus related to two English poets, as a Swift to Dryden-for his grandmother was niece to the poet's grandfather, and as an Erick or Herrick to the author of the Hesperides. Jonathan Swift was born on 30th November 1667, seven months after his father's early death, at 7 Hoey's Court, which formerly stood near the Castle at Dublin. The only other child was his elder sister Jane. Left with the miserable provision of twenty pounds a year, his mother returned to her family in Leicester, leaving her son's education to the care of his uncle Godwin Swift, who sent him at the age of six to Kilkenny School (then the best in Ireland), where he had Congreve for a schoolfellow, and in 1682 entered him at the age of fourteen at Trinity College, Dublin. His college career was desultory, probably wild, and certainly unsuccessful; and he only obtained his degree speciali gratia in 1686. Two years later the turmoil of the Revolution drove him to England, where in 1689 he was received as secretary into the household of the distinguished statesman Sir William Temple (q. v.)-a distant connection of his mother-at Moor Park in Surrey. His proud and independent nature, however, rebelled against the subserviency of the occupation, and after declining a captaincy of horse offered him by William III., who visited Temple's house, and also a clerkship in the Irish Rolls Office tendered by his employer, he left Moor Park for Dublin, where he took orders (deacon, October 1694; priest, January 1695), and was presented by the Lord Deputy to the prebend of Kilroot, near Belfast, of the value of £100 a year Country obscurity soon proved even less to his taste than waiting upon a great man's literary inspirations, and he was not sorry in 1696 to resign his prebend and accept Temple's invitation to return to Moor Park and help him with his papers. By this time Hester Johnson (born at Sheen, 13th March 1681)-immortalised by Swift under the name of Stella-the daughter of a gentlewoman who acted as companion to Lady Giffard, Temple's widowed sister, had grown up into a charming, beautiful, and intelligent girl, and the kindly solicitude of the young Irishman who guided her education was developing into the enduring affection which became the happiness of their two lives. Swift remained at Moor Park till Temple's death in 1699, when he received a legacy of £100 and the privilege of publishing Sir William's posthumous works (which he brought out between 1700 and 1720). His long residence in the house of a cultivated man of the world, despite the subordination that chafed his sensitive pride, had been useful to him. He had

15

found leisure to study; he read enormously in classical and historical literature; he had been brought into personal relations with the king and the ministers, and had learned the business of the politician, which he was soon to practise with signal success. Moreover, the quiet retirement of Temple's house and the solitude of his Irish cure had given him time to produce a masterpiece and a brilliant tour de force-the Tale of a Tub, and the Battle of the Books. The former is held by some critics to be the greatest of Swift's satires; in style and as an artistic whole it certainly stands first. In none of his works is the satire more pointed, the thought more vigorous, the language more nervous and sustained. The cant of religion, the pretensions of letters, the hypocrisies of every form of false virtue or genius are exposed with the keen enjoyment of the iconoclast; the mask is torn from the solemn shams of the world amid derisive laughter. The young genius rejoices in its strength, and spares nothing in its destructive work; and to many minds there is something repellent and sacrilegious in its handling of time-honoured beliefs and institutions, though no profanity was intended. The Battle of the Books, an admirable travesty of the idle controversy then waging between Temple, Wotton, Boyle, and Bentley, concerning the comparative merits of ancient and modern writers, is a much slighter work, but full of exuberant vitality and humour. Both were published anonymously, like almost all Swift's works, in 1704.

Soon after Temple's death, failing in his application to the court for preferment, Swift became secretary to Lord Berkeley, one of the Lords Deputies to Ireland, and his wit enlivened_the society of Dublin Castle by such jests as the Petition of Mrs Frances Harris (1700), in verse, and the parody of Boyle, A Meditation upon a Broomstick (1704), in prose. After being disappointed of the deanery of Derry, he was given the vicarage of Laracor, near Trim, in West Meath, in 1700, and presented to a prebend in St Patrick's Cathedral; and in 1701 he took his doctor's degree at T. C. D. From 1701 to 1710 he divided his time between Laracor and London, where he was employed on ecclesiastical business by the Archbishop of Dublin, and where he contrived to live for half each year on £60. His reputation as a wit, and his suspected authorship of the Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books (to say nothing of his earliest publication, the Dissensions in Athens and Rome, a defence of Lord Berkeley, 1701), assured his position in society and in the clubs and coffee-houses, where he constantly spent his evenings with Addison, Rowe, Prior, Congreve, and every one else worth meeting, and found himself ever more and more in request. He now wrote his humorous squibs on the unlucky almanacmaker, Partridge, under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, and vindicated his position and opinions as a churchman (sorely damaged by the free speaking of the Tale of a Tub) in the Argument to Prove the Inconvenience of abolishing Christianity, the Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Sentiments of a Church of England Man (all in 1708). At Laracor he busied himself with improving the vicarage, church, glebe, and garden, of which he was fond. 'I stayed above half the time,' he says, 'in one scurvy acre of ground, and I always left it with regret.' The regret was heightened by the circumstance that 'Stella,' who had come to Ireland with her companion, Rebecca Dingley, by Swift's advice, after Temple's death, passed much of her time between Trim and Dublin.

For the next three years, from September 1710 to June 1713, Swift was chiefly in London, incessantly engaged in political work. The Whigs had

done nothing for him, and he detested their warpolicy and their views on the church establishment. The Tories, on the other hand, were full of civility and deference, and longed to win his pungent pen to their cause. Moreover, Swift was personally attracted by the character of Harley, the Lord Treasurer, and a warm friendship soon sprang up between these utterly dissimilar natures. So Swift abandoned his neutral position and became a Tory, and taking over the editorship of the Examiner, which had languished in its early | days under Bolingbroke and Atterbury, converted it into a deadly weapon of attack against the Whigs. Swift's Examiners, thirty-three in number (November 1710 to June 1711), may almost be said to have created the 'leading article' and established the power of the press. They are not remarkable for rhetoric or eloquence, but are simple plain trenchant statements of policy and criticisms of opponents, such as the honest country squire could understand, and would have made himself if he had known how. The backbone of Swift's policy was denunciation of the war party as a ring of Whig stockjobbers, who cared nothing for the country, but out of self-interest played into the hands of the Emperor and the Allies. He urged this view, together with his firm belief in the landed interest and the establishment, in numerous brief and telling skits and broadsides in prose and verse, besides several elaborate argumentative pamphlets, such as the Advice to the October Club (1712); Remarks on the Barrier Treaty (1712); and the Public Spirit of the Whigs, a crushing reply to Steele's Crisis (1714); but nowhere so ably and forcibly as in his political masterpiece The Conduct of the Allies, published on November 27, 1711, of which the second edition was sold out in five hours on December 1, and a seventh edition reached in the new year. These writings undoubtedly contributed to the overthrow of Marlborough and the conclusion of the peace of Utrecht in 1713. Among slighter satires of this time may be mentioned The Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician's Rod (1710), directed against Godolphin, and the Windsor Prophecy (1711). Swift was also engaged preparing his History of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne, a laboured production, which was not published till much later; and he also wrote, under his own name, a Proposal for correcting, &c. the English Tongue (1712), which includes the oft-suggested notion of a national academy of letters. His life during these three eventful and laborious years is minutely recorded in his wonderful Journal to Stella, the most faithful and fascinating diary the world has ever seen, in which all his hopes and fears, his daily work and occupations, his growing influence with ministers, everything in short that he did and all that he thought, are set down in perfect honesty and with no thought of publication, but only for the sympathetic interest of his life-companion Hester Johnson. High affairs of state mingle with playful tenderness and the sweet familiarity of the 'little language,' with a natural charm and frankness which make the Journal unique.

Swift's reward for his unwearied labour on behalf of the Tory administration was poor enough. He had throughout kept his independence, and declined to accept the pay of the government like a hired hack. He waited for ecclesiastical preferment; but the queen would not bestow a bishopric on the author of the Tale of a Tub. At last in the evil days that preceded the fall of the ministry he was given the Deanery of St Patrick's at Dublin (April 1713), though he would rather have been sent anywhere else. A year later the crisis came; Harley (now Earl of Oxford) resigned, the queen died, the Whigs came into office, and

Swift's prospect of political influence in London was gone forever.

A romantic episode in his London life had been the passion he inspired in Esther Vanhomrigh (b. 14th February 1692), whom in his usual fashion he called 'Vanessa,' a young girl whom he grew to know intimately at her mother's house in London in 1709-13. He had a fatal habit of playing the mentor to women without looking to the consequences, and there can be no doubt that he behaved with little circumspection in his relations with Vanessa. When he went to Ireland she followed him, and lived sometimes at Dublin and sometimes at a place she had inherited at Celbridge. Whether Swift was married to Stella' or not (and there is no satisfactory evidence for the alleged marriage in 1716), the presence of 'Vanessa' in Turnstile Alley, and of Stella in Ormond Quay, on the other side of the Liffey, must have been extremely embarrassing to the solitary tenant of the Deanery between the two; and there is no doubt that he tried to repress Vanessa's passion. She died of a consumption in 1723, and by her testamentary directions Swift's metrical version of their romance was published, with the title Cadenus [i.e. Decanus] and Vanessa (1726). But what his real relations were with the two women, why he did not marry, or, if he did eventually go through the mere ceremony with 'Stella,' as the legend tells, why he kept his marriage a profound secret, and why they never lived together, remain mysteries still, in spite of more than one plausible explanation. The theory that he believed himself tainted with hereditary madness, supported by the fact that he suffered from mysterious attacks in the head due to a disease in the ear, appears to furnish the best clue to his determination to abjure the privilege of fatherhood; and another reason for his abstinence, compatible with this, has been deduced from the fact that he seems to have never experienced the ordinary emotion of passion. Whatever his passing feeling for Vanessa,' there can be no doubt that he was devotedly attached to 'Stella' to her dying day (28th January 1728), and that in all senses but one few women have been better loved.

When his hopes of further political work in England were demolished by the accession of King George and the Whigs, Swift, now a man of fortyseven, retired to his deanery, and with the exception of two journeys to England in 1726 and 1727, and occasional visits to friends in Ireland, remained there for nearly thirty years. But political influence and activity were essential to his masterful nature, and accordingly he devoted his energies to the wrongs of Ireland, which were then very real indeed. He did this from no love of the land of his exile, nor out of sympathy with the true Irish : he considered Dublin merely a good enough place to die in,' and his voice was raised chiefly on behalf of the narrow Ireland of the Englishry. He defended Ireland only out of a perfect hatred of tyranny and oppression' wherever it was found. Nevertheless his ungracious mediation and his unpalatable home-truths bore marvellous fruit throughout the country; he created and guided popular opinion and for a while made it a power; and the generous impulsive populace worshipped him. His Irish tracts (of which the famous Drapier's Letters, 1724, directed against a supposed fraudulent introduction of a copper currency known as Wood's halfpence;' the Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, 1720; and the audacious Modest Proposal for utilising children as articles of food, 1729, are among the best examples) possess all the merits of his style and method, his inflexible logic, his delightful reductions to absurdity, his burning passion, his tremendous scorn, and his

SWIFT

unsparing virulence in attack. He brought the law upon his printer more than once, but he won the day. Wood's halfpence' were suppressed, and the Lord-lieutenant had to confess good-humouredly that he governed by permission of Dr Swift.'

scorn.

Besides his Irish tracts, a good deal of light verse-never rising to the level of true poetry, and often exceedingly coarse-and his Polite Conversation (1738), a witty parody of small-talk, and Directions to Servants, a savage satire on menial incapacity, Swift's Irish period is notable for the completion of the most famous of all his works: Gulliver's Travels appeared in 1726, and was immediately in the mouth of all the world. This immortal satire needs no description or criticism. In it we see Swift's genius in its full maturity, less impetuous and fiery than in the Tale of a Tub, but sterner, more earnest, more majestic in its It is the terrible earnestness of Swift's indignation at the cant and shams of the world that gives his work its unique force and fire. But with all its deadly satire Gulliver is a wonderful story-book, and its daring fancy joined to a strange sobriety and plausibility, its bizarre situations, its inherent possibility, and its delightful playfulness make it a classic favourite with children, as well as men, to whom the scourge is more apparent than the jest. Swift's style is here seen in its perfection; pointed and direct, simple, masculine, absolutely free from affectation, logical and lucid, it always says just what it means, with never a word wasted; its shafts hit the mark fair in the centre with unerring precision.

Of his life during his later years a record is found in his voluminous correspondence with English friends like Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, and his Irish crony, Dr Sheridan, to name no more. As letters alone they are quite admirable; but as biographical materials they are priceless. No man was stauncher in his friendships than Swift, and in spite of his bitter moods he hardly ever lost a friend. They were all he had to live for after 'Stella's' death, except his duties and charities among the poor in the Liberties of St Patrick, where he was adored. His life had become very lonely and sad, and he dwelt in constant dread of that mental overthrow which he felt was coming. In 1740 his brain disease drove him to the verge of madness, but after two years clouded by periods of unspeakable torment he sank into a helpless, speechless lethargy, and so gradually faded out of life. The long misery and despair, and lonely exile, and final torpor came to an end 19th October 1745, when the most commanding intellect of his time passed from its dreary prison of imbecility to where, in the words of his own epitaph, his sava indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit; and the body of the great dean was laid beside 'Stella,' in the same grave, in the cathedral over which he had reigned for thirty years.

The standard edition of the Works of Swift is Sir | Walter Scott's (19 vols. Edin. 1814; 2d ed. 1824), which

includes most of what was valuable in the earlier collected editions of Hawkesworth and Sheridan, but which stands in need of a thorough revision. Numerous selections from his works have been made; amongst them are those by the present writer, in two volumes, Prose Writings and Journals and Letters (Parchment Library, 1884 and 1885), with introductions, criticisms, and notes, which have been used in this article; by W. Lewin (Camelot Classics, 1886); by H. Morley (Carisbroke Library, 1889-90); and H. Craik (Clarendon Press, 1892). John Forster published the first volume of an exhaustive Life of Jonathan Swift in 1875, which he did not live to complete. The standard biography is that of Henry Craik (1882), and the 'Men of Letters' series contains a skilful Life by Leslie Stephen. References to other authorities will be found in these books. The evidence for the supposed marriage with Stella has been sifted

Swilly, LOUGH, a long narrow inlet of the Atlantic on the north coast of Donegal, Ireland, enters between Dunaff Head on the east and Fanad

Point, on which there is a lighthouse (fixed light visible 14 miles), on the west. A second lighthouse, on Dunree Head, has a fixed light visible for 13 miles. The entrance is protected by forts. Lough width of 3 to 4 miles. On the eastern shore is the Swilly penetrates about 25 miles inland, and has a small town of Buncrana, much resorted to for seabathing. On its waters a French fleet under Bompart was destroyed in 1798; and not many years later H.M.S. Saldanha foundered at the entrance in a storm.

Swimming. From time immemorial the great usefulness of swimming has been universally acknowledged, and the ease with which the art of supporting the human body in water can be acquired is a statement as old as the hills. The absolute correctness of the assertion that there is no difficulty in the way of the individual who would become a swimmer is open to question, but it is certain that the number of those who surmount all obstacles grows larger year by year. This is due in no small measure to the greatly increased facilities for the pursuit of this most healthful and pleasurable pastime afforded by the erection of many additional and improved public baths; also to the extensive encouragement the sport receives from the numerous swimming clubs in existence. Valuable aid is given to those wishing to know how to swim by such works as Wilson's Swimming Instructor; but there is no teaching equal to that which is to be obtained in the water with a proficient as guide. The pupil's every movement is watched, mistakes pointed out, and a bad style avoided a great thing if one wishes to share in the delights of competition, of which there are now so many opportunities. No greater stimulus was ever given to an art than Captain Matthew Webb gave to swimming when he crossed the English Channel in the water. How stupendous the feat is is explained by the time it occupied. Starting from the Admiralty Pier, Dover, on August 24, 1875, Webb swam or floated for 21 h. 45 m., in which time he reached Calais Sands, where his journey ended. By this feat, the greatest recorded, Captain Webb (drowned in 1883 in his attempt to swim through the Niagara Rapids) made himself for ever afterwards famous. A notable long swim was accomplished on September 2, 1884, by Mr Horace Davenport, who held the title of must be reckoned as one of the strongest of strong amateur champion from 1874 to 1879 inclusive, and swimmers, his mile time in still water, 29 m. 25 s., accomplished on August 11, 1887, remaining unbeaten by amateurs. Starting from the East Pier, Southsea, Mr Davenport crossed to Ryde Pier and then returned to the Clarence Esplanade Pier, Southsea, without resting, the double journey in a choppy sea occupying 5 h. 25 m. Other long swims, in which it will be seen ladies have played a prominent part, are as follows: 20 miles 3 furlongs, by F. Cavill, 5 h. 51 m., in Thames (with tide), July 8, 1876; 20 miles, Miss Agnes Beckwith, 6 h. 25 m., in Thames (with tide); 18 miles, F. Cavill, 5 h. 58 m., Yarra, Queensland, March 1879; 10 miles, Miss Agnes Beckwith, 2 h. 43 m., in Thames (with tide), July 5, 1876; 10 miles, J. B. Johnson, 2 h. 40 m., Delaware River, United States (with tide),

August 24, 1875; 9 miles, Miss Emily Parker, 2 h. 24 m. 30 s., in Thames (with tide), September 18, 1875; 5 miles in the sea at Brighton, Miss Dick, 2 h. 43 m., September 9, 1875; 5 miles, C. Whyte, 1 h. 4 m. 23 s., in Thames (with tide), July 18, 1870; 5 miles, Miss Lizzie Gillespie, 1 h. 20 m. 7 s., in river Tay, Dundee (with tide), August 1880; 2 miles, E. T. Jones, 25 m. 223 s., in Thames, September 10, 1877; 2000 yards, J. B. Johnson, 34 m. 30 s., in Serpentine Lake, August 1873; 1 mile, E. T. Jones, 25 m. 223 s., in Thames, September 10, 1877. The difference between swimming in open water and in a bath is exceedingly great, on account not only of the lower temperature of the former, but also because of the advantage turning and pushing off at each end of the bath gives the swimmer. In Hollingworth Lake on August 23, 1884, J. J. Collier swam a mile in 28 m. 19 s.; at Lambeth Baths (40 yards long) the same swimmer, on October 23, 1885, did the distance in 27 m. 3 s. Again, it took Collier 15 m. 44 s. to swim 1000 yards in Hollingworth Lake; while at Lambeth Baths, Westminster, the distance was, on October 16, 1890, swum by J. Nuttall in 13 m. 54 s. The difference in the times for half a mile is comparatively greater; but this may not be so real as the figures indicate. In Hollingworth Lake Collier took 13 m. 464 s.; at Lambeth Bath the time made by J. Nuttall in 1890 was 12 min. 133 s. The best amateur time for half a mile (13 m. 42 s.) in open water was done by S. W. Greaseley, at Turf, near Exminster, on July 18, 1891. A quarter of a mile was swum by J. Finney in Blackpool Bath in 5 m. 57 s.; at Lambeth Nuttall swam 400 yards in 5 m. 16 s. 100 yards were swum in 1 m. 3 s. by J. Haggerty; but the Blackburn Bath in which this was done was only 20 yards long. The best time for Lambeth Baths is 1 m. 6 s., made by J. Nuttall on September 24, 1888. It took him 1 m. 12 s. to cover a like distance in Hollingworth Lake.

Until April 7, 1886, a much disputed question was the length of time a person could remain under water. On the date given J. Finney, in a tank at the Canterbury Theatre of Varieties, London, remained below the surface 4 m. 294 s., which time will probably never be equalled, the nearest approach to it being 3 m. 181 s. on September 27, 1889, by Miss Annie Johnson. Finney also has swum 113 yards 1 foot in costume under water. This he did on October 20, 1882, at Blackpool, in a bath 28 yards 1 foot long. The best plunge or standing dive, the body, which has to be kept face downwards, having no progressive action imparted to it other than the impetus of the dive, stands to the credit of G. A. Blake, who on October 10, 1888, at Lambeth Baths, did 75 feet 7 inches. Among other remarkable performances may be mentioned those of T. Burns, who dived from Runcorn Bridge (85 feet) in October 1889, and then swam to Liverpool, from whence he walked to London and dived off London Bridge; and J. Finney, who, at Man chester on April 30, 1890, with his mouth picked up seventy-five coins from the bottom of a tank, his hands being tied behind his back.

See such works as Wilson's Swimming Instructor (1883), or Cobbett's Swimming (1889). See also the articles CRAMP, RESPIRATION (ARTIFICIAL), DROWNING, and HUMANE SOCIETY.

Swinburne, ALGERNON CHARLES, was born in London on April 5, 1837, but belongs to a Northumbrian family, being the son of Admiral Swinburne and of Lady Jane Henrietta, the daughter of the Earl of Ashburnham. He was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford, which he entered in 1857 and which he left without taking a degree. He then spent some time in travelling on the Continent, and in 1864 he visited Walter Savage Landor at Florence. On his return to

England he became closely associated with Dante Rossetti and William Morris, and his life has thenceforth been that of a man of letters and has been mainly spent in London. His first book, a tragedy entitled The Queen Mother and Rosamund, was published in 1861, but did not excite much attention. It was otherwise with Atalanta in Calydon, which appeared in 1864, and proved that a new singer with an exquisite lyrical gift had arisen. Mr Swinburne has produced no poem of similar length so full of beauties as Atalanta; and there are some, and these, perhaps, not the least competent judges of his verse, by whom this drama is even now more dearly prized than any other of its author's works. The tragedy of Chastelard was deservedly far less successful, and in 1866 the first series of Poems and Ballads awakened a storm of adverse criticism. The outcry was in the main unjust; but one or two of the pieces had better not have been written, and the language of others was now and then such as to give a colour of plausibility to the strictures passed on the book. The finest pieces, Hesperia, Itylus, A Match, The Garden of Proserpine, the Hymn to Proserpine, The Triumph of Time-these, to name but these, were a revelation to students of English verse. The writer struck a note which none had struck before. You might object, and now and then rightly object, to the erotic tone of certain passages, but there was no resisting the lyric fire and the consummate artistry, the magnificence of the rhythm, the new, strange sweetness of the music. A Song of Italy appeared in 1867 and an Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic in 1871. By the publication in the latter year of Songs before Sunrise Mr Swinburne was again exposed to censure, extravagant in part and in part not unmerited. There is much admirable verse-fiery and ringing and technically perfect-in the volume; it contains, however, no such fascinating masterpieces of lyric art as the best of the Poems and Ballads, and to most readers the political opinions held by Mr Swinburne at the time of its composition will appear to be visionary and crude, and to be often intemperately urged. In 1871 Mr Robert Buchanan attacked Dante Rossetti and Mr Swinburne on the score of the alleged immoral tendency of their verse; the accuser's pamphlet, The Fleshly School, drawing forth a counter pamphlet, Under the Microscope, from Mr Swinburne. Bothwell, a long chronicle play, without any attempt at theatric structure, in which historic truth, so far as understood by the poet, was made the primary quest, appeared in 1874; Erechtheus, a noble lyric drama, extremely unlike Atalanta, inasmuch as it was written with great exactitude (even as to the number of its verses) upon the lines of a Greek drama, in 1875; and a second series of Poems and Ballads in 1878. Since then their author has issued Songs of the Springtides; Songs of Two Nations; Studies in Song; A Century of Roundels; Marino Faliero; Locrine, a rhymed tragedy; Tristram of Lyonesse, a fine narrative poem in decasyllabic couplets; Mary Stuart, a play completing the trilogy begun in Chastelard and continued in Bothwell; and a third series of Poems and Ballads, containing the superb sea-and-battle piece, The Armada, in 1887. The Sisters, a short tragedy of modern life, published in 1892, was less favourably received than any of his previous works. Mr Swinburne's prose works include two volumes of critical essays (on Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Rossetti, Tennyson, Musset, &c.), and separate studies of William Blake, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, Charlotte Brontë, Hugo, and Shakespeare. He has one pre-eminent excellence as a critic, the faculty of discerning and giving the most generous recognition to literary merit in its most dissimilar forms-in Congreve as in Wordsworth,