good-humoured chaff, and would not have stood the scrutiny of his
subtler mind. Doubtless he, like Ben Jonson, inclined to see signs of
the "strong" in the astringent and the gritty; but no one knew better,
when he chose, to wed his "strength" with "sweetness." The falling-off
of the present volume compared with _Men and Women_ or _Dramatis
Personæ_ lay less in the lack of either quality than in his failure to
bring them together. Of the "stiff brew" there is plenty; but the
choicest aroma comes from that "wine of memories"--the fragrant
reminiscences--which the poet affected to despise. The epilogue ends,
incorrigibly, with a promise to "posset and cosset" the cavilling reader
henceforward with "nettle-broth," good for the sluggish blood and the
disordered stomach.

The following year brought a production which the cavilling reader might
excusably regard as a fulfilment of this jocose threat. For the
translation of the _Agamemnon_ (1877) was not in any sense a serious
contribution to the English knowledge and love of Greek drama. The
Balaustion "transcripts" had betrayed an imperfect sensibility to the
finer qualities of Greek dramatic style. But Browning seems to have gone
to work upon the greatest of antique tragedies with the definite
intention of showing, by a version of literal fidelity, how little the
Greek drama at its best owed to Greek speech. And he has little
difficulty in making the oracular brevity of Aeschylus look bald, and
his sublime incoherences frigid.[61] The result is, nevertheless, very
interesting and instructive to the student of Browning's mind. Nowhere
else do we feel so acutely how foreign to his versatile and athletic
intellect was the primitive and elemental imagination which interprets
the heart and the conscience of nations. His acute individualism in
effect betrayed him, and made his too faithful translation resemble a
parody of this mighty fragment of the mind of Themistoclean Athens by