Many people would be mildly surprised to hear that it is possible to discuss a Swinburnian “love affair.” Some, perhaps, would be astonished to learn that Swinburne had a love affair; others, possibly, to hear that he had only one. Still others, no doubt, gripped by recollections of hot bloodbeats pulsating in persistent anapests, would be startled to learn that such a love affair, if there was one, could be discussed in print. But rumor, even of the printable sort, has not been idle. The story of his affair with Adah Menken, the comely and bosomy vaudevillian who provided Dumas père (aged sixty-four) with an Indian summer and (she hoped) Swinburne himself, aged twenty-nine, with a Pierian spring, has always appealed to raconteurs, and, in all conscience, it is a good anecdote. For years it was bruited about that Swinburne was in love with Mathilde Blind, a bluestocking poetess, and this fantasy had scarcely been dealt with before another ghost appeared—the absurd and irresponsible claim that Swinburne was in love and planned to elope with Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti, the wife of his dearest friend. Each of the stories, along with many others, has come, and, after its brief day, gone again, and no great harm has been done. To Mathilde Blind, Swinburne was a friend, an alert and cautious friend, and nothing more. Mrs. Rossetti he adored in life and revered in memory, but not one syllable of evidence supports the assertion, or even the suspicion, that his sentiment had anything in common with romantic love. Swinburne himself pronounced the final word about his relations with the tawdry “Dolores” Menken, and nothing can or need be added or subtracted: she was, he wrote (just after her death) in a private letter to a close friend, “most lovable as a friend as well as a mistress.” But this is not the language of passion. To each of these three women Swinburne was attracted in some way, but by no sophistication of vocabulary could any one of the three attachments be termed a “love affair.”