Having done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married.

Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle.

But its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and neglects him as a poet.

But a better test was coming.

Browning's poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in _Dramatic Lyrics_, published in 1842.