ABSTRACT
Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Whitmania’, Fortnightly Review(1887). Reprinted in The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, (1926), ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, V, 307–18.
For an earlier statement by Swinburne, see No. 32.
The little-known Jephson with whom Swinburne in his last sentence chooses to compare Whitman is Robert Jephson (1736- 1803), an Irish dramatist who, after serving with the British army, retired in England where he was a friend of Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Reynolds and other distinguished men. His plays include a tragedy Braganza (1775), Conspiracy (1796) and The Law of Lombardy (1779). He was also the author of The Confessions of Jacques Baptiste Couteau, a satire on the French revolutionaries.
