"with a 'look you' vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, Over us, under, round us every side." The portrait of the poet of Valladolid, on the other hand (_How it Strikes a Contemporary_), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular misconception and obtuseness. A grotesquely idle legend of the habits of the "Corregidor" flourishes among the good folks of Valladolid; the speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but unimaginative observer ("I never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and makes us acquainted with everything but the inner nature of the man. We see the corregidor in the streets, in his chamber, at his frugal supper and "decent cribbage" with his maid, but never at his verse. We see the alert objective eye of this man with the "scrutinizing hat," who "stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, ... If any beat a horse, you felt he saw, If any cursed a woman, he took note,"-- and all this, for Browning, went to the making of the poet, but we get no inkling of the process itself. Browning had, in his obscure as in his famous days, peculiar opportunities of measuring the perversities of popular repute. Later on, in the heyday of his renown, he chaffed its critical dispensers in his most uproarious vein in _Pacchiarotto_. The _Popularity_ stanzas present us with a theory of it conveyed in that familiar manner of mingled poetry and grotesqueness which was one of the obstacles to his own. There is, however, among these fifty men and women one true and sublime poet,--the dying "Grammarian," who applies the alchemy of a lofty imagination to the dry business of verbal erudition. "He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever.'" This is one of the half-dozen lyrics which enshrine in noble and absolutely individual form the central core of Browning's passion and thought. Even the verse, with its sequence of smooth-flowing iambics broken by the leap of the dactyl, and the difficult double rhyme, sustains the mood of victorious but not lightly won serenity of soul--"too full for sound and foam." It is, among songs over the dead, what _Rabbi ben Ezra_ and _Prospice_ are among the songs which face and grapple with death; the fittest requiem to follow such deaths as those. Like Ben Ezra, the Grammarian "trusts death," and stakes his life on the trust:-- "He ventured neck or nothing--heaven's success Found, or earth's failure: 'Wilt thou trust death or not?' He answered, 'Yes: Hence with life's pale lure!'"