It may amuse us to circle with him through his arguments, though every one knows he will yield at last and that yielding is more honest than his talk; but what we ask is--Was the matter worth the trouble of more than two thousand lines of long-winded verse?
Was it worth an artist's devotion?
or, to ask a question I would not ask if the poem were good art, is it of any real importance to mankind?
Is it, finally, anything more than an intellectual exercise of Browning on which solitary psychologists may, in their turn, employ their neat intelligence?
This poem, with the exceptions of some episodes of noble poetry, is, as well as the three others, a very harlequinade of the intellect.
I may say, though this is hypercritical, that the name of Don Juan is a mistake.

Every one knows Don Juan, and to imagine him arguing in the fashion of this poem is absurd.

He would instantly, without a word, have left Elvire, and abandoned Fifine in a few days.

The connection then of the long discussions in the poem with his name throws an air of unreality over the whole of it.

The Don Juan of the poem had much better have stayed with Elvire, who endured him with weary patience.