Excerpt from The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Vol. 1 What we are able to give is, however, and will probably remain, a very considerable portion of Swinburne's Correspondence, for three reasons the first, that no one, except his Mother, appears to have kept his early letters, so far at least as we have hitherto been able to discover the second, that a good deal of what must have been very familiar and interesting has, as we have learned on inquiry, been destroyed; the third, that in comparison with most recent authors of great eminence Swinburne wrote few letters. He experienced, as I have explained elsewhere, a physical difficulty in the exercise of penmanship, and yet even during the closing years of his life he refrained from availing himself of the services of a secretary. The bare idea of Swinburne's using a type-writing machine brings a smile to the lips of any one who recollects-his capitulation at the approach of any species of mechanism. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.