ABSTRACT
It is probable that no man of our times has written so much and so well without general acknowledgment as Robert Browning. The poet whom poets love best often lacks the favourable voice of the public; but although his more ambitious efforts may be unknown to them, some song, or graceful line, at least, of his, is usually familiar in many a mouth that cannot tell from whom they come. It very rarely happens that everything a writer of genius pens is ‘caviare to the multitude,’ but it happens sometimes, and it has done so in the case of the author we have mentioned. Mr. Browning is the poetic idol of men who give laws to cliques and coteries. The Athenœum ‘kotows’ to him. Mr. Ruskin quotes from him at length in obvious admiration. Even at the university, where new poets find little acceptance, his exquisite verses are set by enthusiastic professors to be rendered into Greek by the candidates for the Classical Tripos. And yet we are afraid that not one in ten of the people who subscribe to Mudie’s1 have ever read a word of his writings. The reason of this is certainly not that they are not worth reading. They have great beauty, undoubted originality, and a dramatic vigour that is equalled by no poet living. The obstacles to his popularity are, on the other hand, manifold. He has chosen to make his dwelling in Italy, and to select from thence the subjects of his muse. His preference for that spot is undisguised, and, to Englishmen, almost repulsive. At all events, under such circumstances, a poet can scarcely expect to be accepted in his own country. His topic being thus alien, to begin with, he takes pains to deprive it still more of interest by selecting the period of action two or three hundred years back or so, his favourite century being the sixteenth. Finally, he strains off his possible audience-select enough already-by writing in as involved a style as he can,
