this serio-grotesque jingle was great; some readers may be permitted to wish that many of his rhymes were not merely difficult but impossible.  At a dinner given by Sir Leslie Stephen he met successfully the challenge to produce a rhyme for “rhinoceros,” and for Tennyson’s diversion he delivered himself of an impromptu in which rhymes were found for “Ecclefechan” and “Craigenputtock.”  But in rhyming ingenuity Browning is inferior to the author of “Hudibras,” in a rhymer’s elegant effrontery he is inferior to the author of “Don Juan.”  Browning’s good-humoured effrontery in his rhymes expects too much good-humour from his reader, who may be amiable enough to accept rough and ready successes, but cannot often be delighted by brilliant gymnastics of sound and sense.  In like manner it asks for a particularly well-disposed reader to appreciate the wit of Browning’s retort upon his critics:  “You are chimney-sweeps,” he sings out in his great voice, “listen!  I have invented several insulting nicknames for you.  Decamp! or my housemaid will fling the slops in your faces.”  This may appear to some persons to be genial and clever.  It certainly has none of the exquisite malignity of Pope’s poisoned rapier.  Perhaps it is a little dull; perhaps it is a little outrageous.

The Browning who masks as Shakespeare in At the Mermaid disclaims the ambition of heading a poetical faction, condemns the Byronic Welt-schmerz, and announces his resolvedly cheerful acceptance of life.  Elsewhere he assures his readers that though his work is theirs his life is his own; he will not unlock his heart in sonnets.  Such is the drift of the verses entitled House; a peep through the window is permitted, but “please you, no foot over threshold of mine.”  This was not Shakespeare’s wiser way; if he hid himself behind his work, it was with the openness and with the taciturnity of Nature.  He did not stand in the window of his “House” declaring that he was not to be seen; he did not pull up and draw down the blind to make it appear that he was at home and not at home.  In the poem Shop Browning continues his assurances that he is no Eglamor to whom verse is “a temple-worship vague and vast.”  Verse-making is his trade as jewel-setting and jewel-selling is the goldsmith’s—­but do you suppose that the poet lives no life of his own?—­how and where it is not for you to guess, only be certain it is far away from his counter and his till.  These poems were needless confidences to the public that no confidences would be vouchsafed to them.

But the volume of 1876 contains better work than these pieces of self-assertion.  The two love-lyrics Natural Magic and Magical Nature have each of them a surprise of beauty; the one tells of the fairy-tale of love, the other of its inward glow and gem-like stability. Bifurcation is characteristic of the writer; the woman who chooses duty rather than love may have done well, but she has chosen the easier