t simultaneously with his death in Italy, _Asolando_, which some
think by far his best volume since _Dramatis Personae_, a quarter of a
century older. These volumes occasionally contained a few, and
_Asolando_ contained several, of the lovely lyrics above referred to.
But the great bulk of them consisted of the curious blank verse, now
narrative, now ostensibly dramatic monologue, which the poet had always
affected, and which he now seemed to affect more and more. In them, too,
from _The Ring and the Book_ onwards, there appeared a tendency stronger
than ever to an eccentric and almost burlesque phraseology, which at one
time threatened to drown all his good qualities, as involution of
thought had threatened to drown them in the _Sordello_ period. But this
danger also was averted at the last.

Critical estimate of Browning's poetry was for years hampered by, and
cannot even yet be said to have been quite cleared from, the violent
prepossessions of public opinion respecting him. For more than a
generation, in the ordinary sense, he was more or less passionately
admired by a few devotees, stupidly or blindly ignored by the public in
general, and persistently sneered at, lectured, or simply disliked by
the majority of academically educated critics. The sharp revulsion of
his later years has been noticed; and it amounted almost to this, that
while dislike to him in those who had intelligently, if somewhat
narrowly, disapproved of his ways was not much affected, a Browning
_cultus_, almost as blind as the former pooh-poohing or ignoring, set
in, and extended from a considerable circle of ardent worshippers to the
public at large. A "Browning Society" was founded in 1881, and received
from the poet a kind of countenance which would certainly not have been
extended to it by most English men of letters. During his later years
handbooks solemnly addressed to neophytes in Browningism, as if the cult
were a formal science or art, appeared with some frequency; and there
has been even a bulky _Browning Dictionary_, which not only expounds the
more recondite (and, it is fair to say, tolerably frequent) allusions of
the master, but provides for his disciples something to make up for the
ordinary classical and other dictionaries with which, it seemed to be
presumed, their previous education would have made them little
conversant.

This not very wise adulation in its turn not unnaturally excited a sort
of irritation and dislike, to a c