It might seem that enough had been said to explain why Browning is popular. The attitude of the ordinary intelligent reader toward him is, I presume, easily stated. A good many of Browning's mystifications, _Sordello_, for one, he simply refuses to bother himself with. _Le jeu_, he says candidly, _ne vaut pas les chandelles_. Other works he goes through with some impatience, but with an amount of exhilarating surprise sufficient to compensate for the annoyances. If he is trained in literary distinctions, he will be likely to lay down the book with the exclamation: _C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la poésie!_ And probably such a distinction will not lessen his admiration; for it cannot be asserted too often that the reading public to-day is ready to accede to any legitimate demand on its analytical understanding, but that it responds sluggishly, or only spasmodically, to that readjustment of the emotions necessary for the sustained enjoyment of such a poem as _Paradise Lost_. But I suspect that we have not yet touched the real heart of the problem. All this does not explain that other phase of Browning's popularity, which depends upon anything but the common sense of the average reader; and, least of all, does it account for the library of books, of which Professor Herford's is the latest example. There is another public which craves a different food from the mere display of human nature; it is recruited largely by the women's clubs and by men who are unwilling or afraid to hold their minds in a state of self-centred expectancy toward the meaning of a civilisation shot through by threads of many ages and confused colours; it is kept in a state of excitation by critics who write lengthily and systematically of "joy in soul." Now there is a certain philosophy which is in a particular way adapted to such readers and writers. Its beginnings, no doubt, are rooted in the naturalism of Rousseau and the eighteenth century, but the flower of it belongs wholly to our own age. It is the philosophy whose purest essence may be found distilled in Browning's magical alembic, and a single drop of it will affect the brain of some people with a strange giddiness.