SD2690. Algernon Charles Swinburne to Lord Houghton

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 302 (in part).

Albergo della Gran Bretagna,

March 31 [1864]

My dear Lord Houghton

I meant to write you a word two days since …

Not that I am disloyal to Tennyson, into whose church we were all in my time born and baptized as far back as we can remember at all; but he is not a Greek nor a heathen; and I imagine does not want to be; and I greatly fear believes it possible to be something better: an absurdity which should be left to the Brownings and other blatant creatures begotten on the slime of the modern chaos.

Publication: The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven, Conn., 1959–62), 1, 96–99.

Manuscript: Trinity College, Cambridge.

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