Heh. Now I'm wondering how swiftly Swinburne:Herod quips were making the rounds. (I forget where I first read it, but the phrase "rot about babies" is definitely GMH, and makes me grin w/how much exasperation it manages to convey within three words.)

....and there's also the unintentional humor aspect -- GMH was probably not trying to be funny when complaining about Swinburne, Hugo, Milton, et al., but the forcefulness of his snark entertains me.

(To Robert Bridges, 3 April 1877 -- on some sonnets RB had sent to him)

Yours are not at all like Wordsworth's, and a good thing too, for beautiful as those are they have an odious goodiness and neckcloth about them which half throttles their beauty.

(And again to Bridges, about Mr. Swinburne, 29 April 1889)

Swinburne has a new volume out, which is reviewed in its own style: 'The rush and the rampage, the pause and the pull-up of these lustrous and lumpophorous lines'. It is all now a 'self-drawing web'; a perpetual functioning of genius without truth, feeling, or any adequate matter to be at function on. There is some heavydom, in long waterlogged lines (he has no real understanding of rhythm, and though he sometimes hits brilliantly at other times he misses badly) about the Armada, that pitfall of the patriotic muse; and rot about babies, a blethery bathos into which Hugo and he from opposite coasts have long driven Channel-tunnels. I am afraid I am going too far with the poor fellow. Enough now, but his babies make a Herodian of me.

ETA: quotes from The Letters of GMH to RB