to the claims of sense, the extent of
this sacrifice is very much less than is generally supposed. The notion,
only too general, expressed by such a phrase as "his habitual rudeness
of versification" (used by no unfavourable _Edinburgh_ reviewer in 1869)
is one of the most singularly erroneous perversions of popular prejudice
that have ever called for correction at the hands of serious criticism.

Browning is far indeed from paying no attention, or little, to metre and
versification. Except in some of his later blank verse, and in a few
other cases, his very errors are just as often the result of hazardous
experiments as of carelessness and inattention. In one very important
matter, that of rhyme, he is perhaps the greatest master in our
language; in single and double, in simple and grotesque alike, his
rhymes are as accurate as they are ingenious. His lyrical poems contain
more structural varieties of form than those of any preceding English
poet, not excepting Shelley. His blank verse at its best is more vital
in quality than that of any modern poet. And both in rhymed and in blank
verse he has written passages which for almost every technical quality
are hardly to be surpassed in the language.

That Browning's style should have changed in the course of years is only
natural, and its development has been in the natural (if not always in
the best) direction. "The later manner of a painter or poet," says
F.W.H. Myers in his essay on Virgil, "generally differs from his earlier
manner in much the same way. We observe in him a certain impatience of
the rules which have guided him to excellence, a certain desire to use
his materials more freely, to obtain bolder and newer effects." These
tendencies and others of the kind are specially manifest in Browning, as
they must be in a writer of strongly marked originality; for originality
always strengthens with use, and often hardens to eccentricity, as we
may observe in the somewhat parallel case of Carlyle. We find as a
consequence that a great deal of his later poetry is much less
attractive and much less artistically perfect than his earlier work,
while just those failings to which his principles of poetic art rendered
him liable become more and more frequent and prominent. But, good or
bad, it has grown with his growth, and we can conceive him saying, with
Aurora Leigh,

"So life, in deepening with me, deepened all
The course I took, the work I did. Indeed