The Two Poets of Croisic is a comedy in narrative, dealing mainly with the true tale of Paul Desforges-Maillard, whose story furnished Piron with the matter of his Metromanie.  The first of the “two poets” is one Rene Gentilhomme, born 1610, once page to the Prince of Conde, afterwards court-poet to Louis XIII.  His story, by an easy transition, leads into the richer record of Desforges, which Browning gives with not a few variations, evidently intentional, from the facts of the case.  Paul-Briand Maillard, self-surnamed Desforges, was born at Croisic, April 24, 1699:  he died at the age of seventy-three.  His memory has survived that of better poets on account of the famous hoax which he played on the Paris of his day, including no less a person than Voltaire.  The first part of the story is told pretty literally in Browning’s pages:—­how Desforges, unsuccessful as a poet in his own person, assumed the title of a woman, and as Mlle. Malcrais de la Vigne (his verses being copied by an obliging cousin, Mme. Mondoret) obtained an immediate and astonishing reputation.  The sequel is somewhat altered.  Voltaire’s revenge when the cheat was discovered, so far from being prompt and immediate, was treacherously dissimulated, and its accomplishment deferred for more than one long-subsequent occasion.  Desforges lived to have the last word, in assisting at the first representation of Piron’s Metromanie, in which Voltaire’s humiliation and the Croisic poet’s clever trick are perpetuated for as long as that sprightly and popular comedy shall be remembered.

In his graphic and condensed version of the tale, Browning has used a poet’s licence to heighten the effect and increase the piquancy of the narrative.  The poem is written in ottava rima, but, very singularly, there is not one double rhyme from beginning to end.  It is difficult to see why Browning, a finer master of grotesque compound rhymes than Byron, should have so carefully avoided them in a metre which, as in Byron’s hands, owes no little of its effect to a clever introduction of such rhymes.  The lines (again of set purpose, it is evident) overlap one another without an end-pause where in Italian it is almost universal, namely, after the sixth line.  The result of the innovation is far from successful:  it destroys the flow of the verse and gives it an air of abruptness.  Of the liveliness, vivacity and pungency of the tale, no idea can be given by quotation:  two of the stanzas in which the moral is enforced, the two finest, perhaps, in the poem, are, however, severable from their context:—­

      “Who knows most, doubts most; entertaining hope,
        Means recognizing fear; the keener sense
      Of all comprised within our actual scope
        Recoils from aught beyond earth’s dim and dense. 
      Who, grown familiar with the sky, will grope
        Henceforward among groundlings?  That’s offence
      Just as indubitably:  stars abound
      O’erhead, but then—­what flowers made glad the ground!