ABSTRACT
In April 1882 Swinburne told Scott:
I have just sent to the publishers the biggest book of verse – bar Bothwell – that ever I launched on the devoted heads of the public. Like your own volume, it contains poems on ‘a little boy’ – forty of them in all, besides others on babies … so that I expect ‘the Mothers of England’ to rally round me on the publication of a volume in which, out of a total of one hundred poems, between forty and fifty are devoted to the praise of little children: though I cannot expect the approbation of the British Matron for certain passages – or indeed for one entire canto – of the leading poem, ‘Tristram of Lyonesse,’ in ten parts, ranging from about 800 to about 2000 lines.
