The audience which now welcomed Browning was in fact substantially that which had hailed the first fresh runnels of Mr Swinburne's genius a few years before; the fame of both marked a wave of reaction from the austere simplicity and attenuated sentiment of the later _Idylls of the King_.

Readers upon whom the shimmering exquisiteness of Arthurian knighthood began to pall turned with relish to Browning's Italian murder story, with its sensational crime, its mysterious elopement, its problem interest, its engaging actuality.
[Footnote 47: W.M.Rossetti reports Browning to have told him, in a call, March 15, 1868, that he "began it in October 1864.

Was staying at Bayonne, and walked out to a mountain-gorge traditionally said to have been cut or kicked out by Roland, and there laid out the full plan of his twelve cantos, accurately carried out in the execution." The date is presumably an error of Rossetti's for 1862 (_Rossetti Papers_, p.

302).
Cf.

Letter of Sept.