Do our readers exclaim, "But where's poetry--the dickens--in all this rigmarole?" We confess we can find none--we can find nothing but a set purpose to be obscure, and an idiot captivity to the jingle of Hudibrastic rhyme. This idle weakness really appears to be at the bottom of half the daring nonsense in this most daringly nonsensical book. Hudibras Butler told us long ago that "rhyme the rudder is of verses;" and when, as in his case, or in that of Ingoldsby Barham, or Whims-and-Oddities Hood, the rudder guides the good ship into tracks of fun and fancy she might otherwise have missed, we are grateful to the double-endings, not on their own account, but for what they have led us to. But Mr. Browning is the mere thrall of his own rudder, and is constantly being steered by it into whirlpools of the most raging absurdity. This morbid passion for double rhymes, which is observable more or less throughout the book, reaches its climax in a long copy of verses on the "Old Pictures of Florence," which, with every disposition to be tolerant of the frailties of genius, we cannot hesitate to pronounce a masterpiece of absurdity. Let the lovers of the Hudibrastic admire these _tours de force_:-- Not that I expect the great Bigordi Nor Sandro to hear me, chivalric, bellicose; Nor wronged Lippino--and not a word I Say of a scrap of Fra Angelico's. But you are too fine, Taddeo Gaddi, So grant me a taste of your intonaco-- Some Jerome that seeks the heaven with a sad eye? No churlish saint, Lorenzo Monaco? * * * * * * * Margheritone of Arezzo, With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret, (Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so, You bald, saturnine, poll-clawed parrot?) No poor glimmering Crucifixion, Where in the foreground kneels the donor? If such remain, as is my conviction, The hoarding does you but little honour. The conclusion of this poem rises to a climax:-- How shall we prologuise, how shall we perorate, Say fit things upon art and history-- Set truth at blood-heat and the false at zero rate, Make of the want of the age no mystery! Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras, Show, monarchy its uncouth cub licks Out of the bear's shape to the chimæra's-- Pure Art's birth being still the republic's! Then one shall propose (in a speech, curt Tuscan, Sober, expurgate, spare of an "_issimo_,") Ending our half-told tale of Cambuscan, Turning the Bell-tower's altaltissimo. And fine as the beak of a young beccaccia The Campanile, the Duomo's fit ally, Soars up in gold its full fifty braccia, Completing Florence, as Florence, Italy.