History and story have furnished many of the incidents which he has worked up in his dramatic lyrics and romances like "Clive," "Hervé Riel," "Donald," etc. There remains, however, a large number of poems containing some of Browning's loveliest work in which the subject-matter is, as far as we know, the creation of pure, unadulterated fancy. "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," "In a Balcony," "Colombe's Birthday," "Childe Roland," "James Lee's Wife" are some of them. Even in this rapid survey of the field the fact is patent that Browning's range of subject-matter is infinitely wider and his method of developing it far more varied than has been that of any other English poet. He seems the first to have completely shaken himself free from the trammels of classic or mediæval literature. There are no echoes of Arthur and his Knights in his poetry, the shadows of the Greek gods and goddesses exert no spell--except in the few instances when he deliberately chose a Greek subject. The fact that Browning was so free from classical influence in the great body of his work as compared with the other chief poets of the nineteenth century gives an especial interest to those poems in which he chose classical themes for his subjects. There are not more than ten all told, and one of these is a translation, yet they represent some of his finest and most original work, for Browning could not touch a classical theme without infusing into it that grasp and insight peculiar to his own genius. His first and most conventionally classical poem is the fragment in "Men and Women," "Artemis Prologizes," written in 1842. It was to have been the introduction to a long poem telling of the mad love of Hippolytus for a nymph of Artemis, after that goddess had brought about his resuscitation. It has been suggested by Mr. Boynton in an interesting paper that Browning shows traces of the influence of Landor in his poetry. This fragment certainly furnishes argument for this opinion, though it has a strength of diction along with its Greek severity and terseness of style which leads to the conclusion that the influence came from the fountain head of Greek poetry itself rather than through the lesser muse of this nineteenth-century Greek. The poem is said to have been begun on a sick-bed and when the poet recovered he had forgotten or lost interest in his plans. This is to be regretted for if he had continued as he began, the poem would have stood unique in his work as a true survival of Greek subject wedded with classical form and style, and would certainly have challenged comparison with the best work done in this field by Landor or Swinburne, who tell over the classical stories or even invent new episodes, but, when all is said, do not write as if they were actually themselves Greeks.