Robert Browning is the greatest thinker in poetry since Shakespeare', people have heard it said; and the remark appears to us no exaggeration. Here Browning uses harsh sounds and rough rhythm to mockingly deride the ultimate importance of new biological theories. It was a quality which protected Browning the poet, if not Browning the man-about-town, from becoming an institutional eminent Victorian. In the provincial English resort town of Bournemouth, the French poet Paul Verlaine, already disgraced by first loving then shooting Arthur Rimbaud, was teaching French and feeling some of the same impulses. In the early decades of the twentieth-century it became the fashion to laugh at the 'easy optimism' of the kind that one can find in Browning's Epilogue. The town was Paris and the country was the area near the Norman resort village of St Aubin, where Browning frequently took a long autumn holiday.