Those who knew him say that he would often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its object.

This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the theory of Browning's intellectual conceit.

A man would have to be somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation of his own plans.

The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards.

The words "tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a conventional accuracy.