heir belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded
language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and
almost a frivolity. But there was nothing in which he was so
thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that
when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense,
he immediately did so. Many great writers have contrived to be
tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which
they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity
had not been found in any great writer since the time of Rabelais and
the time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes of
Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting
of a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists
and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real
hilarity. People must be very happy to be so easily amused.

In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question is
somewhat more difficult to handle. Many people have supposed Browning
to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly
less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was
profound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but
as a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each
other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of
the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is
temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was
expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that a
person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's
style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:--

"Hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats.
Nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup.
Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats--
Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?
What porridge had John Keats?"

The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must
indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be
conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. But the point of the
matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not
abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and
straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious
fact of life. The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if
we k