The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under discussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was more of an Elizabethan than a Victorian.  He was like the Elizabethans in their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and almost a frivolity.  But there was nothing in which he was so thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, he immediately did so.  Many great writers have contrived to be tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity had not been found in any great writer since the time of Rabelais and the time of the Elizabethans.  In many of the comic scenes of Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting of a pun to death through three pages.  In the Elizabethan dramatists and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real hilarity.  People must be very happy to be so easily amused.

In the case of what is called Browning’s obscurity, the question is somewhat more difficult to handle.  Many people have supposed Browning to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was profound.  He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but as a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each other.  Browning’s dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was expressing was profound or superficial.  Suppose, for example, that a person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning’s style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:—­

    “Hobbs hints blue—­straight he turtle eats. 
      Nobbs prints blue—­claret crowns his cup. 
    Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats—­
      Both gorge.  Who fished the murex up? 
    What porridge had John Keats?”

The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected.  But the point of the matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious fact of life.  The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if we know the meaning of the word “murex,” which is the name of a sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre.  The poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature, and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural comment:—­