Our readers may think it is inconsistent to blame both extremesbut we do not ask for a profile view-we want the full countenance; this we get in Shakspere. The modern playwrights give us but one side of the face; we see it is onesided, we ask for a fuller, bolder, broader view; they then present the other profile; they seem afraid to look human nature full in the face or do they think truth is a Medusa, and that we shall be turned into stone by its Gorgon look? Mr. Browning's plots are singularly deficient also in human interest; with the exception of "Strafford" and the "Blot in the 'Scutcheon," they are all founded on subjects which make no appeal to the masses; he is truly caviare to the million. He is the poet of the exception, not the rule! He will be highly prized by the one, but totally neglected by the many. His poetry is a curiosity, and a rarity for the virtuoso, and not a thing of interest for the crowd. Mr. Browning can, however, select a simple touching subject, and treat it intelligibly. Witness the little incident at Ratisbon:

"You know we French stormed Ratisbon,

A mile or so away,

On a little mound Napoleon

Stood, on our storming day;

With neck out thrust; you fancy how,

Legs wide, arms locked behind,

As if to balance the prone brow,

Oppressive with its mind.

Just as, perhaps, he mused-' my plans

That soar to earth may fall,

Let once my army leader Lannes

Waver at yonder wall!'

Out 'twixt the battery smokes there flew

A rider, bound on bound,

Full galloping; nor bridle drew

Until he reached the mound.

With a few cramped abbreviations this is plain enough, and the action is presented graphically to the reader's imagination; as a contrast, let him turn to a poem entitled "Christina." We will help the otherwise bewildered student a little, by informing him that the poem is supposed to be the meditation of a youth who has gone mad for love of Queen Victoria. He commences by reproaching the royal object of his passion, that she encouraged his attachment by looking at him accidentally when her carriage passed him :

"She should not have looked at me,

If she meant I should not love her;
There's plenty-men you call such,
I suppose-she may discover

Oh! observe of course next moment
The world's honors in derision,
Trampled out the light for ever;

Never fear but there's provision
Of the devil's to quench knowledge,

Lest we walk the earth in rapture!
Making those who catch the secret

Just so much more prize their capture !"

Very mad, indeed, as a poet says—

"Tilburina in white satin, and her attendant in white muslin,

I declare, upon my word, are not one half so puzzling!"

Mr. Browning seems to be fond of verses supposed to be written by madmen. Two other poems are of the same class, entitled "Mad House Cells." Mr. Coleridge laid himself open to Lord Byron's sarcasm for writing verses on an ass, and drew from the splenetic poet

"How well the subject suits his noble mind,
A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind!"

We are quite certain he would not have spared the author of these "mad poems."

What, however, will our readers say when we assure them that

Mr. Browning has written a poem of three hundred and twenty pages in the same unintelligible style; it is composed in heroic couplets, and is altogether a perfect marvel. We have before incidentally alluded to this as almost persuading Mr. Douglas Jerrold of his own idiocy, from his inability to comprehend two consecutive lines.

An English writer endeavored to account for this terrible phenomenon by giving it as his opinion, that when the whole poem was set up, some unlucky or malignant printer's devil or compositor disturbed the type, taking care to leave the final words unaltered. This is, so far as I can imagine, the only rational way for accounting for the poem; if, however, it should not be so, certainly the work is intended for a seventh sense, not yet vouchsafed to us.

With regard to what appears to be most obscure in these "Lyrics," we should never lose sight of the fact that they are dramatic, for Mr. Browning's mind is so essentially "abstractedly dramatic," that this quality pervades every thing he writes. When you have studied the matter as though it were a puzzle, a problem, or a hieroglyphic, then many beauties appear in bold relief; but, as we said before, a writer should not give his readers that trouble, but take it off their hands himself, and render it clear to all. We might just as well write in stenography or Greek, and insist upon all learning either the system or the language. Mr. Jerrold once observed that Browning did worse than even that, viz. “wrote Greek in short-hand." The originality of Browning appears often a distortion rather than a novelty; a contradiction to the course of nature, a growing of the roots in the air! and not in the earth; an originality is nature in a new and legitimate form, and not a lusus

naturæ.

We doubt if any reader ever enjoyed thoroughly the fine poem entitled "France," till the whole had been explained to him. The argument is this: An orphan girl is brought up by an uncle whose two daughters are envious of their cousin's beauty and accomplish

ments; their jealousy reaches such a pitch that it prompts them to urge the betrothed knight of one of them to accuse the beautiful orphan of unchastity. They select the morning of the day when the object of their hatred is to be crowned Queen of the May. It must be borne in mind that the fair victim is relating to a female friend of hers this dreadful passage in her youthful days. We may as well put our readers in possession of all the story at once. The knight accuses her, as prompted by the cousins; another knight, who secretly loved the beautiful orphan, gives him the lie; they fight; the traducer is killed-confessing, ere he dies, the plot, and the rescued beauty rewards the noble champion with her hand. When she is relating this, she has been a happy wife and mother for some years. The scene is laid in France. The poem commences in the following startling manner :

"Christ God, who savest man, save most

Of men, Count Gismond, who saved me!
Count Gauthier, where he chose his post
Chose time, and place and company
To suit it; where he struck at length

My honor's face, 'twas with full strength."

The fair orphan believes all love her; especially her two cousins:

"They too so beauteous, each a queen,

By virtue of her brow and breast."

The following stanza is a curious instance of Mr. Browning's wilfulness on the score of versification.

"But no; they let me laugh and sing

My birth-day song quite through; adjust

The last rose in my garland; fling

A last look in the mirror; trust
My arm to each, an arm of theirs,
And so descend the castle stairs.