courteous, and to the bold, free, conscienceless child of nature whose favour he buys, and with whom, after all his barren metaphysics, he departs, only to attain, when his brief spell of foolish freedom is over, loneliness and cynic satiety.  It may amuse us to circle with him through his arguments, though every one knows he will yield at last and that yielding is more honest than his talk; but what we ask is—­Was the matter worth the trouble of more than two thousand lines of long-winded verse?  Was it worth an artist’s devotion? or, to ask a question I would not ask if the poem were good art, is it of any real importance to mankind?  Is it, finally, anything more than an intellectual exercise of Browning on which solitary psychologists may, in their turn, employ their neat intelligence?  This poem, with the exceptions of some episodes of noble poetry, is, as well as the three others, a very harlequinade of the intellect.

I may say, though this is hypercritical, that the name of Don Juan is a mistake.  Every one knows Don Juan, and to imagine him arguing in the fashion of this poem is absurd.  He would instantly, without a word, have left Elvire, and abandoned Fifine in a few days.  The connection then of the long discussions in the poem with his name throws an air of unreality over the whole of it.  The Don Juan of the poem had much better have stayed with Elvire, who endured him with weary patience.  I have no doubt that he bored Fifine to extinction.

The poems that follow these four volumes are mixed work, half imaginative, half intellectual.  Sometimes both kinds are found, separated, in the same poem; sometimes in one volume half the poems will be imaginative and the other half not.  Could the imaginative and intellectual elements have now been fused as they were in his earlier work, it were well; but they were not.  They worked apart.  His witful poems are all wit, his analytical poems are all analysis, and his imaginative poems, owing to this want of fusion, have not the same intellectual strength they had in other days. Numpholeptos, for instance, an imaginative poem, full too of refined and fanciful emotion, is curiously wanting in intellectual foundation.

The Numpholeptos is in the volume entitled Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper.  Part of the poems in it are humorous, such as Pacchiarotto and Filippo Baldinucci, excellent pieces of agreeable wit, containing excellent advice concerning life.  One reads them, is amused by them, and rarely desires to read them again.  In the same volume there are some severe pieces, sharply ridiculing his critics.  In the old days, when he wrote fine imaginative poetry, out of his heart and brain working together, he did not mind what the critics said, and only flashed a scoff or two at them in his creation of Naddo in Sordello.  But now when he wrote a great deal of his poetry out of his brain alone, he became sensitive to criticism.  For that