If we measure Browning's own work by the poetic standards which he has himself set up in the course of that work, it is quite evident that he has on the whole lived up to them. He has shown himself to be an illustration of the evolutionary principles in which he believes by breaking away from all previous standards of taste in poetry. The history of poetry in England has shown this to be a distinctive characteristic of all the greatest English poets. From Shakespeare down they have one and all run afoul of the critics whose special province seems to be to set up literary shibboleths which every genius is bent upon disregarding. When Spenser was inventing his stanza, verse critics were abject in their worship of hexameters, and their hatred of bald rhymes. Though these sticklers for classical forms could see clearly enough that Spenser was possessed of genius, they yet lamented the blindness of one, who might have written hexameters, perversely exclaiming "Why a God's name may not we as else the Greeks have the kingdom of our own language, and measure our accents by the sound, reserving quantity to the verse?" When Milton appears and finds blank verse the medium best suited to his subject, he comes up against the rhyming standards of his day and is forced to submit to the indignity of having his "Paradise Lost" "tagged with rhymes," as he expresses it, by Dryden, who graciously devoted his powers of rhyme to an improved version of the poem. Milton was actually obliged to defend himself in his preface to "Paradise Lost" for using blank verse, as Browning defends himself in the Epilogue to "Pacchiarotto and How We Worked in Distemper" for writing "strong" verse instead of the "sweet" verse the critics demand of him. By the time the nineteenth century dawns the critics are safely intrenched in the editorial den, from which, shielded by any sort of shibboleth they can get hold of, they may hurl forth their projectiles upon the unoffending head of the genius, who, with no chance of firing back in the open arena of the magazine, must either suffer in silence or take refuge in sarcastic slurs upon his critics in his poetry, for here lies the only chance of getting even without waiting for the whirligig of time to bring the public round to a recognition of the fact that he is the one who has in very truth, "fished the murex up."