Browning sometimes yielded to this temptation to be a great deal too like himself.
"Will I widen thee out till thou turnest From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace, To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest." This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in Swinburne.

But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital aesthetic deficiency.

In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian to have written the Hymn to Proserpine.

In the same way, the essential issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote bad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning's you could have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such incomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory." The answer must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole justification of Browning as an artist.
The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his functions as an artist?
We have already agreed that his artistic originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the grotesque.

It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the eternal and fundamental elements in life?
One of the most curious things to notice about popular aesthetic criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are intended to express an aesthetic failure, and which express merely an aesthetic variety.