and more frequent than any
poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and
imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be
uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on
him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument
and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers
of melody, his method when he chose to play upon the gong, or the
ancient instrument of marrow-bone and cleavers, was the exact
antithesis of Tennyson's; and he set on edge the teeth of those who
love the exquisite cadences of _In Memoriam_ and _Maud_. Browning has
left deep influence, if not a school. The younger Lytton, George
Meredith, Buchanan, here and there Swinburne and William Morris, seem
to break loose from the graceful harmony which the Tennysonians affect,
and to plunge headlong into the obscure, the uncouth, the ghastly, and
the lurid. No one denies originality and power in many of these
pieces: but they are flat blasphemy against the pellucid melody of the
Tennysonian idyll. Our poetry seems to be under two contrary spells:
it is enthralled at one time by the ravishing symmetry of Mozart; at
another time it yearns for the crashing discords that thunder along the
march of the Valkyrie through the air.

As in poetry, so in prose. We find in our best prose of to-day an
extraordinary mastery over pure, nervous, imaginative language; and all
this, alongside here of a riotous extravagance, and there, of a crude
and garrulous commonplace. Thackeray's best chapters, say in _Vanity
Fair_, _Esmond_, the _Humourists_, contain an almost perfect prose
style--a style as nervous as that of Swift, as easy as that of
Goldsmith, as graceful as that of Addison, as rich as that of Gibbon or
Burke. No English romances have been clothed in a language so chaste
and scholarly--not even Fielding's. Certainly not the Waverley series;
for Scott, as we know, rehearsed his glowing chronicles of the past
with the somewhat conventional verbosity of the _improvisatore_ who
recites but will not pause to write. George Eliot relates her story
with an art even more cultivated than that of Thackeray--though,
doubtless, with an over-elaborated self-consciousness, and perceptible
suggestions of the laboratory of the student. Trollope tells his
artless tales in perfectly pure, natural, and most articulate prose,
the language of a man of the world telling a good sto