It is this--that it is absolutely necessary to remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of the badness of his artistic aim.

Browning's style may be a good style, and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it.

On this point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by the public towards the poets.

It is very little realised that the vast majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad poetry.

The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson.
Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but treated simply as his failures.