Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/87

 a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her husband.' Browning's satire is a little old-fashioned, and has too much of the railing, 'flyting' as the Scots have it, which recalls the savage origin of the Old Comedy. And the worst of it (for no one need give much concern or pity to the dunces in this controversy)—the worst of it is that Browning does not seem to know what his own poetry is really like. It is not enough to say that his poetry is rough but honest (for that is what his Epilogue comes to) those who have lived on his poetry know that there is more in it than strength, and that the critical depreciation of Browning's verse is as futile as the rejection of Wordsworth's, or the older condemnation of Donne. As to this last, it should be remembered that Ben Jonson's sentence to Drummond: 'that Done for not keeping of accent deserved hanging', was spoken by the man who best understood and most valued Donne: 'He esteemeth John Done the first poet in the world in some things.' Lovers of Wordsworth and Browning might be allowed the same sort of freedom without impairing their regard for these poets' melodies. Wordsworth's verse is not to be judged by Andrew Jones or Ellen Irwin. There is ground enough in Browning for the Heptalogia parody:

But it is wrong to take the harsh colliding consonants as a true sample of Browning's art. It is well to remember the music that he has added to the store of English poetry—poetical music in which he is not the opponent but the partner of Tennyson.

Many people doubtless have amused themselves with thinking of the great rival authors—Tennyson and Browning, Thackeray and Dickens, Macaulay and Carlyle—who seem, in that age, to represent in pairs the two opposite kinds of