It may be repeated that either he wrote these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them.
It is permissible to say that the _Dramatic Lyrics_ represent the arrival of the real Browning of literary history.

It is true that he had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious plan--_Paracelsus_ with its splendid version of the faults of the intellectual, _Pippa Passes_ with its beautiful deification of unconscious influence.

But youth is always ambitious and universal; mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type and colour of work which a man is destined to do.

Youth is universal, but not individual.

The genius who begins life with a very genuine and sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, after all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else.