illustrate merely his normal interest in the obscure freaks and
out-of-the-way anomalies of history. The doings of these "people" had
once been "important" to Browning himself, and the old man's memory
summoned up these forgotten old-world friends of his boyhood to be
championed or rallied by their quondam disciple. The death of the
dearest friend of his later life, J. Milsand, in 1886, probably set
these chords vibrating; the book is dedicated to his memory. Perhaps the
_Imaginary Conversations_ of an older friend and master of Browning's,
one even more important in Browning's day and in ours than in his own,
and the master of his youth, once more suggested the scheme. But these
_Parleyings_ are conversations only in name. They are not even
monologues of the old brilliantly dramatic kind. All the dramatic zest
of converse is gone, the personages are the merest shadows, nothing is
seen but the old poet haranguing his puppets or putting voluble
expositions of his own cherished dogmas into their wooden lips. We have
glimpses of the boy, when not yet able to compass an octave, beating
time to the simple but stirring old march of Avison "whilom of Newcastle
organist"; and before he has done, the memory masters him, and the
pedestrian blank verse breaks into a hymn "rough, rude, robustious,
homely heart athrob" to Pym the "man of men." Or he calls up Bernard
Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend
Carlyle--"whose groan I hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of
mock--melancholy." Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had
interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of
art--the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this "inferior"
way with a splendour of poetry that makes his ironic exposure
dangerously like an unwitting vindication. These visions of Prometheus
on the storm-swept crag, of Artemis hunting in the dawn, show that
Browning was master, if he had cared to use it, of that magnificent
symbolic speech elicited from Greek myth in the _Hyperion_ or the