his successive poems had been everywhere reviewed at
length; a large public was genuinely interested in him, while a yet
larger complained of his "obscurity," but did not venture to ignore him,
and gossiped eagerly about his private life. He himself, mingling
freely, an ever-welcome guest, in the choicest London society, had the
air of having accepted the world as cordially as it on the whole
accepted him. Yet barriers remained. Poems like the _Red-cotton
Night-cap Country_, the _Inn Album_, and _Fifine_ had alienated many
whom _The Ring and the Book_ had won captive, and embarrassed the
defence of some of Browning's staunchest devotees. Nobody knew better
than the popular diner-out, Robert Browning, how few of the men and
women who listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his inner
mind; and he did little to assist their insight. The most affable and
accessible of men up to a certain point, he still held himself, in the
deeper matters of his art, serenely and securely aloof. But it was a
good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found quite natural
expression in a volley of genial chaff at the critics who thought
themselves competent to teach him his business. This is the main, at
least the most dominant, note of _Pacchiarotto_. It is like an aftermath
of _Aristophanes' Apology_. But the English poet scarcely deigns to
defend his art. No beautiful and brilliant woman is there to put him on
his mettle and call out his chivalry. The mass of his critics are
roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial sally, as "sweeps"
officiously concerned at his excess of "smoke." _Pacchiarotto_ is a
whimsical tale of a poor painter who came to grief in a Quixotic effort
to "reform" his fellows. Rhyme was never more brilliantly abused than in
this _tour de force_, in which the clang of the machinery comes near to
killing the music. More seriously, in the finely turned stanzas _At the
Mermaid_, and _House_, he avails himself of the habitual reticence of
Shakespeare to defend by implication his own reserve, not without a
passing sarcasm at the cost of the poet who took Europe by storm with
the pageant of his broken heart. _House_ is for the most part rank
prose, but it sums up incisively in the well-known retort:

"'_With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart_,' once more!
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

This "house" image is singularly frequ