SWINBURNE

in Pope as in Webster, in Anthony Trollope as in Cyril Tourneur. The genius of Victor Hugo, however, has been unto him even as a siren, his idolatry of the great romanticist not only finding expression in immoderate eulogy, but prompting him now and then to belittle the works of other poets most notably those of Alfred de Musset. The merits and defects of his prose style were at first almost equally striking. He abused his magnificent cominand of epithet, he was super-emphatic, and he frequently employed figures which are only admissible in verse. These defects are much less conspicuous in his later essays, and in his finest passages it would be hard to excel the splendid glow and ornate grace of the diction and the stately mould of the sentences.

Mr Swinburne is the greatest metrical inventor in English literature. Öther poets have equalled him in melody, but none other has revealed the tunefulness and pliancy, the majesty and grace of the English speech in such a variety of lyrical forms. He can impart dignity and distinction to the simplest measures, and move with faultless ease in the most elaborate. He can take a thing like the roundel, a form which seemed to be only adapted for ingenious trifling, and render it a sonorous instrument for brooding thought or impassioned imagination. He can give rapid and graceful movement to heavy-laden, long-drawn metres which other artists in verse would find unworkably cumbrous. He can stir the blood by the rush and resonance of a battle-chorus, or charm the ear by the music of a love-lyric as sweet as the songs of spring. His music is like no other man's, and whether the verses are running lightly, marching proudly, or swinging impetuously, the music is alike irresistible. He has been accused of tautology and obscurity, and even of drowning sense in sound. He has no doubt a tendency to use redundant phrases and unfamiliar inversions, and to carry alliteration to excess. But the charge of obscurity has been generally urged in ignorance of his aims and from misappreciation of his craftsmanship. With the possible exception of Gérard de Nerval, he is the modern poet whose aims and methods approach most closely to the musician's. Vague Mr Swinburne sometimes is; but he is so most often of artistic intent. Words which may at first seem pleonastic and even meaningless are discovered on further reading to have been inserted with delicate art to deepen the impression of mystery or beauty which the writer sought to suggest by the verbal music of a given passage. In dealing with nature his endeavour is not to produce a minute transcript, but to render the spirit of a scene, to catch and convey the elusive haunting secret of its loveliness or its terror. The Garden of Cymodoce admirably illustrates his descriptive method. You feel at first as if the meaning of certain phrases were escaping you; but as you read, the charm, at once daunting and seductive, of the wonderful sea-hall-the magic of the lovely crimson glimmer and of the gloom which seems to dilate above the black silent water-is borne in upon you by the suggestion of the music, the subtle verbal colouring and shading, the premeditated vagueness of certain lines, as it could never have been by any number of direct and minute descriptive touches. The poem is as perfect in one way as Keats's Hymn to Pan is in another. Of all our poets Mr Swinburne is the poet of the sea He knows the ocean in all its moods; he has rendered with equal perfection the revel of storming surges, the magnificent rolling of deep-sea billows, the soft glow of the bowers of the waterworld, the sensuous delight of a swimmer swimming out as the morning breaks over the green rippling deep. His versatility has not yet gained

due recognition. He has dealt with the most various subjects and drunk inspiration from the most various sources; he has worked as a lyric, a narrative, and a dramatic poet; in style he has ranged from the most ornate manner to the most austere. None of his later volumes can awaken the delight with which his readers greeted the outburst of soaring song and lyric fire in Atalanta. The joy of that surprise can never be renewed. And in splendour of rhythm, in witchery of phrase, in passionate imaginative glow the last series does not and could not well surpass the first series of Poems and Ballads. But in nobility of aspiration, width of sympathy, and bracing love of nature the advance is indubitable. In the early poems (saving Atalanta) the air was too often as that of a hothouse; it was enervating to linger in the society of Felice and Yolande and Juliette. But the old languor and pessimism have passed away; the mournful amorist of the First Series, the indignant rebel of Songs before Sunrise, has become the exultant singer of the sea and the sea-wind, the high-hearted lyrist of the great deeds and imperial destiny of England. In the early poems we were transported to the clear-cut, clear-coloured hills of Greece and the drowsy garden-closes of the south; in the latest we hear the night-wind rushing over the 'mirk muir sides' of the Scottish Border and the Tyne roaring in spate. Mr Swinburne's plays, setting aside Atalanta, are of far inferior importance to his lyrics, though they contain noble passages of poetry, and though in one character, his Mary Stuart, he has achieved a triumph of dramatic creation. It is as a lyrist in some ways unsurpassed that Mr Swinburne will keep a place in English literature.

Swindling. See FRAUD.

Swindon, a town of Wiltshire, 77 miles W. of London and 29 ENE. of Bath, consists of Old Swindon (Svindune in Domesday), on an eminence 1 mile S., and New Swindon, which originated in the transference hither in 1841 from WoottonBassett of the engineering works of the Great Western Railway. The former is rather a picturesque place, with a good Decorated parish church (rebuilt by Sir G. G. Scott in 1851), a town-hall (1852), assembly rooms (1850), and a corn exchange (1867); New Swindon has a mechanics' institute 22,374; (1891) 32,840 (5545 in Old Swindon). (1843), a theatre, &c. Pop. (1861) 6856; (1881)

See J. E. Jackson's Swindon and its Neighbourhood (1861), and the English Ill. Mag. for April 1892. Swine. See PIG.

Swinemünde, a fortified seaport of Prussia, on Usedom Island, at the entrance of the narrow channel of Swine, connecting the Grosses Haff (into which the Oder flows) with the Baltic. It is yearly entered by nearly 500 vessels of 229,000 tons burden (one-third British), and has valuable fisheries and excellent sea-bathing. Pop. 8626.

Swing, a cognomen assumed by senders of threatening letters during the period when the irritation of the agricultural labourers of England against their employers was at its height, namely from 1830 to 1833. The cause of this misunderstanding arose from a wide-spread belief on the part of the labourers that the use of machinery would greatly lessen the demand for labour, and consequently produce a general reduction of wages; it was also intensified by the savage severity with which the game-laws were enforced, and by other hardships to which the labouring classes in the country considered themselves unjustly subjected. As disregard by landlords or farmers of the demands contained in these threatening letters was constantly followed by the burning of stacks and farm-buildings, the employers of labour became so

terrified that in very many cases almost implicit obedience was paid to the dictates of Captain Swing.'

Swinton, (1) a town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 5 miles NNE. of Rotherham. It has manufactures of bottles, iron, pottery, &c. Pop. (1891) 9697.—(2) A town of Lancashire, 4 miles WNW. of Manchester, with cotton-mills and brickfields. Pop. of Swinton and Pendlebury urban sanitary district (1871) 14,052; (1891) 20,197.

Swiss Guards, a celebrated corps or regiment of Swiss mercenaries in the French army of the old régime, constituted Gardes' by royal decree in 1616. Mercenaries as they were, they were ever unswerving in their fidelity to the Bourbon kings, and their courage never blazed more brightly than on the steps of the Tuileries, 10th August 1792. They had been ordered to leave Paris by a decree of the Assembly on July 17th, but had not yet been sent farther than their barracks, when on August 8th, in anticipation of insurrection, they were ordered to march to the Tuileries. Michelet gives their number as 1330; Challamel, Pollio, and Marcel in Le Bataillon du Dix Août (1881) as 1200; Louis Blanc as 950; Mortimer Ternaux as 900 to 950. But the number may now be taken definitely as nearly 800, including the ordinary guard of the king (see Captain de Durler's MS. Relation printed by Mr H. Morse Stephens in Eng. Hist. Review for April 1887). In anticiparangements to defend the palace, but the National

tion of a storm Mandat had made admirable ar

Guards fraternised with the insurgents, and Mandat himself was murdered on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, whither he had gone by the king's command on a summons from the municipality. Meanwhile a growing mob under Santerre, with the famous 500 men of Marseilles at their head, marched on the Tuileries. But before they reached the palace Roederer had persuaded the king to leave the Tuileries and place himself and the royal family under the protection of the National Assembly. He was accompanied thither by 150 Swiss, besides two hundred gentlemen and about a hundred National Guards. The remainder were left without orders, uncertain what to do, and when Westermann with his Marseillais and a raging mob made their way through the gate of the Tuileries and across the court the 650 Swiss under Captain Durler faced them on the great staircase, knowing only the orders of the night before that they were not to suffer themselves to be forced. Westermann, an Alsatian, tried to win them over by speaking to them in German, but it was not so that these men had learned duty. Some one fired a shot, and the struggle began. The Swiss had already driven back Westermann with about a hundred dead, when the king hearing the firing sent them orders to leave the palace. They fought their retreat across the gardens, while the mob swarmed into the palace and murdered a few wounded men they found there. Those under Durler made their way to the Assembly, were disarmed and placed in the neighbouring church of the Feuillants; but those who were posted in the corridors and rooms of the palace did not hear the order to retreat, and were speedily attacked, overpowered by the mob, and hunted to death. A few fought their way out across the gardens only to find the drawbridge up, whereupon they made for the Place Louis XV., formed a square under the statue of the king, and were cut to pieces where they stood. Few but those who found refuge in the church of the Feuillants survived that fatal day. Fifty-four were sent to the Abbaye and were among the first to perish in the atrocious September massacres. The heroism of the Swiss Guards was fittingly com

memorated in 1821 by the great lion outside one of the gates of Lucerne, cut out of the rock after a model by Thorwaldsen.

See Pfyffer d'Altishofen's Récit de la Conduite des Gardes Suisses (Lucerne, 1824); Durler's Relation already quoted; vol. ii. (1891) of H. Morse Stephens' History of the French Revolution; also the article MERCENARIES. Switchback, a term applied to a zigzagging, alternate back and forward mode of progression up a slope. A switchback railway' originally meant one where the ascent is up a steep incline simplified by curving the track backwards and forwards (and upwards) on the face of the slope. Afterwards the term came to be applied to a railway where (as at is largely effected by their own weight alone, Mauch Chunk, q.v.) the movement of the carriages the descents by gravity and the ascents by a stationary engine. (This railway, once used for carrying coal, was superseded in this capacity by excursions.) Hence the application to the wella tunnel, and subsequently reserved for pleasure ing-places, fairs, and exhibitions: a short length known apparatus for amusing the public at waterof elevated railway with a series of rounded inclines, so that the car gains enough of momentum descending the first steep incline to ascend one or more smaller inclines till it gradually and more slowly works its way to the original level at the far end of the course. Thence it returns in the circular. Very similar were the so-called Montagnes same way. Sometimes these switchbacks are made Russes, elevated wooden frames with (wheeled) cars rushing down and up the slopes again, designed to represent Russian snow-slides, which were introduced into Paris as a popular amusement about had been described by Lord Baltimore in his Gaudia 1815. The Flying Mountains' of St Petersburg Poetica (1770). Thomas Moore's Epicurean, published in 1827, and based on some knowledge of the Montagnes Russes, describes very nearly the

modern switchback.

Swithin, or SWITHUN, ST, Bishop of Winchester from 852 to 862. The 11th century Life attributed to Gotzelin may contain elements of historical truth, and according to it he was tutor to Egbert's son Ethelwulf, under whom he was made bishop. He was a devoted builder of churches, and a man of unusual piety and humility. He built a bridge at the east side of the city, and here he used to sit and watch his workmen. One day some of them broke an old woman's basket of eggs, whereupon the bishop miraculously restored them. He died in 862 and was buried in the churchyard of Winchester, having asked, says William of Malmesbury, to be laid where 'passers by might tread on his grave, and where the rain from the eaves might fall on it.' A century later he was canonised, and the monks exhumed his body to deposit it in the cathedral; but this translation, which was to have taken place on the 15th July, is said, though unfortunately not by contemporary chroniclers, to have been delayed in consequence of violent rains. Hence the still current belief that if rain fall on the 15th July it will continue to rain for forty days. Unhappily Professor Earle has exploded the ingenious legend about the saint's displeasure, and shown that a much more probable origin is to be found in some primeval pagan belief regarding the meteorologically prophetic character of some day about the same period of the year as St Swithin's. In France the watery saints' days are those of St Médard (8th June), and St Gervais and St Protais (19th June). The rainy saint in Flanders is St Godelieve (6th July), and in Germany among the saints' days to which this belief attaches is that of the Seven Sleepers (27th June).