freely, an ever-welcome guest, in the choicest London society, had the air of having accepted the world as cordially as it on the whole accepted him.  Yet barriers remained.  Poems like the Red-cotton Night-cap Country, the Inn Album, and Fifine had alienated many whom The Ring and the Book had won captive, and embarrassed the defence of some of Browning’s staunchest devotees.  Nobody knew better than the popular diner-out, Robert Browning, how few of the men and women who listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his inner mind; and he did little to assist their insight.  The most affable and accessible of men up to a certain point, he still held himself, in the deeper matters of his art, serenely and securely aloof.  But it was a good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found quite natural expression in a volley of genial chaff at the critics who thought themselves competent to teach him his business.  This is the main, at least the most dominant, note of Pacchiarotto.  It is like an aftermath of Aristophanes’ Apology.  But the English poet scarcely deigns to defend his art.  No beautiful and brilliant woman is there to put him on his mettle and call out his chivalry.  The mass of his critics are roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial sally, as “sweeps” officiously concerned at his excess of “smoke.” Pacchiarotto is a whimsical tale of a poor painter who came to grief in a Quixotic effort to “reform” his fellows.  Rhyme was never more brilliantly abused than in this tour de force, in which the clang of the machinery comes near to killing the music.  More seriously, in the finely turned stanzas At the Mermaid, and House, he avails himself of the habitual reticence of Shakespeare to defend by implication his own reserve, not without a passing sarcasm at the cost of the poet who took Europe by storm with the pageant of his broken heart. House is for the most part rank prose, but it sums up incisively in the well-known retort: 

                                        “’With this same key
      Shakespeare unlocked his heart,’ once more! 
        Did Shakespeare?  If so, the less Shakespeare he!”

This “house” image is singularly frequent in this volume.  The poet seems haunted by the idea of the barrier walls, which keep off the public gaze, but admit the privileged spirit.  In Fears and Scruples it symbolises the reticence of God.  In Appearances the “poor room” in which troth was plighted and the “rich room” in which “the other word was spoken” become half human in sympathy.  A woman’s “natural magic” makes the bare walls she dwells in a “fairy tale” of verdure and song.  The prologue seems deliberately to strike this note, with its exquisite idealisation of the old red brick wall and its creepers lush and lithe,—­a formidable barrier indeed, but one which spirit and love can pass.  For here the “wall” is the unsympathetic throng who close the poet in; there