First of all, they are plays, and not works—­like the dropsical dramas of Sir Henry Taylor and Mr. Swinburne.  Some of them have stood the ordeal of actual representation; and though it would be absurd to pretend that they met with that overwhelming measure of success our critical age has reserved for such dramatists as the late Lord Lytton, the author of ‘Money,’ the late Tom Taylor, the author of ‘The Overland Route,’ the late Mr. Robertson, the author of ‘Caste,’ Mr. H. Byron, the author of ‘Our Boys,’ Mr. Wills, the author of ‘Charles I.,’ Mr. Burnand, the author of ‘The Colonel,’ and Mr. Gilbert, the author of so much that is great and glorious in our national drama; at all events they proved themselves able to arrest and retain the attention of very ordinary audiences.  But who can deny dignity and even grandeur to ‘Luria,’ or withhold the meed of a melodious tear from ‘Mildred Tresham’?  What action of what play is more happily conceived or better rendered than that of ’Pippa Passes’?—­where innocence and its reverse, tender love and violent passion, are presented with emphasis, and yet blended into a dramatic unity and a poetic perfection, entitling the author to the very first place amongst those dramatists of the century who have labored under the enormous disadvantage of being poets to start with.

Passing from the plays, we are next attracted by a number of splendid poems, on whose base the structure of Mr. Browning’s fame perhaps rests most surely,—­his dramatic pieces; poems which give utterance to the thoughts and feelings of persons other than himself, or as he puts it when dedicating a number of them to his wife:—­

     “Love, you saw me gather men and women,
     Live or dead, or fashioned by my fancy,
     Enter each and all, and use their service,
     Speak from every mouth the speech—­a poem;”

or again in ’Sordello’:—­

     “By making speak, myself kept out of view,
     The very man as he was wont to do.”

At a rough calculation, there must be at least sixty of these pieces.  Let me run over the names of a very few of them.  ‘Saul,’ a poem beloved by all true women; ‘Caliban,’ which the men, not unnaturally perhaps, often prefer.  The ‘Two Bishops’:  the sixteenth-century one ordering his tomb of jasper and basalt in St. Praxed’s Church, and his nineteenth-century successor rolling out his post-prandial Apologia.  ‘My Last Duchess,’ the ‘Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister,’ ’Andrea del Sarto,’ ‘Fra Lippo Lippi,’ ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra,’ ‘Cleon,’ ’A Death in the Desert,’ ‘The Italian in England,’ and ‘The Englishman in Italy.’

It is plain truth to say that no other English poet, living or dead, Shakespeare excepted, has so heaped up human interest for his readers as has Robert Browning....

Against these dramatic pieces the charge of unintelligibility fails as completely as it does against the plays.  They are all perfectly intelligible; but—­and here is the rub—­they are not easy reading, like the estimable writings of the late Mrs. Hemans.  They require the same honest attention as it is the fashion to give to a lecture of Professor Huxley’s or a sermon of Canon Liddon’s; and this is just what too many persons will not give to poetry.  They