is last speech,
with its clumsy yet genuine chivalry, its touching, broken words, its
fine feeling and faltering expression, is one of the most pathetic
things I know. Such a character, in its very absence of subtlety, is a
triumph of Browning's, to whom intellectual simplicity must be the
hardest of all dramatic assumptions.

24. PACCHIAROTTO, and how he worked in Distemper: with other poems.

[Published in July, 1876 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XIV.
pp. 1-152).]

_Pacchiarotto and other Poems_ is the first collection of miscellaneous
pieces since the _Dramatis Personae_ of 1864. It is somewhat of an
exception to the general rule of Browning's work. A large proportion of
it is critical rather than creative, a criticism of critics; perhaps it
would be at once more correct and concise to call it "Robert Browning's
Apology." _Pacchiarotto_, _At the "Mermaid"_, _House_, _Shop_ and
_Epilogue_, are all more or less personal utterances on art and the
artist, sometimes in a concrete and impersonal way, more often in a
somewhat combative and contemptuous spirit. The most important part of
the volume, however, is that which contains the two or three
monodramatic poems and the splendid ballad of the fleet, _Herve Riel_.

The first and longest poem, _Of Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in
Distemper_, divides itself into two parts, the first being the humorous
rendering of a true anecdote told in Vasari, of Giacomo Pacchiarotto, a
Sienese painter of the sixteenth century; and the second, a still more
mirthful onslaught of the poet upon his critics. The story--

"Begun with a chuckle,
And throughout timed by raps of the knuckle,"--

is funny enough in itself, and it points an excellent moral; but it is
chiefly interesting as a whimsical freak of verse, an extravaganza in
staccato. The rhyming is of its kind almost incomparable as a sustained
effort in double and triple grotesque rhymes. Not even in _Hudibras_,
not even in _Don Juan_, is there anything like them. I think all other
experiments of the kind, however successful as a whole, let you see now
and then that the author has had a hard piece of work to keep up his
appearance of ease. In _Pacchiarotto_ there is no evidence of the
strain. The masque of critics, under the cunning disguise of May-day
chimney-sweepers:--

"'We critics as sweeps out your chimbly!
Much soot to remove from your flue, sir!
Who spares coal in kitchen an't