He knew, like the others, that the drama was beyond his power.
Tennyson and Browning did not so easily recognise their limits.

They went on writing dramas, not for the study, which would have been natural and legitimate, but for the stage.

This is a curious psychological problem, and there is only one man who could have given us, if he had chosen, a poetic study of it, and that is Browning himself.

I wish, having in his mature age read _Strafford_ over, and then read his other dramas--all of them full of the same dramatic weaknesses as _Strafford_--he had analysed himself as "the poet who would be a dramatist and could not." Indeed, it is a pity he did not do this.

He was capable of smiling benignly at himself, and sketching himself as if he were another man; a thing of which Tennyson, who took himself with awful seriousness, and walked with himself as a Druid might have walked in the sacred grove of Mona, was quite incapable.
However, the three important dramas of Tennyson are better, as dramas, than Browning's.