MY DEAR OLD ALFRED--I abuse Browning myself; and get others to abuse him; and write to you about it; for the sake of easing my own heart--not yours. Why is it (as I asked Mrs. Tennyson) that, while the Magazine critics are belauding him, _not one_ of the men I know, who are not inferior to the writers in the Athenæum, Edinburgh, etc., can _endure_, and (for the most part) can read him at all? I mean his last poem. Thus it has been with the Cowells, Trinity Thompsons, Donnes, and some others whom you don't know, but in whose candour and judgment I have equal confidence, men and women too. Since I wrote to your wife, Pollock, a great friend of Browning's, writes to me. "I agree with you about Browning and A. T. I can't understand it. _Ter conatus eram_ to get through the Ring and the Book--and failing to perform the feat in its totality, I have stooped to the humiliation to point out extracts for me (they having read it _all quite through_ three times) and still could not do it. So I pretend to have read it, and let Browning so suppose when I talk to him about it. But don't you be afraid"? (N.B. I am _not_, only angry) "things will come round, and A. T. will take his right place again, and R. B. will have all the honours due to his learning, wit and philosophy." Then I had the curiosity to ask Carlyle in my yearly letter to him. He also is, or was, a friend of B.'s, and used to say that he looked on him as a sort of light-cavalry man to follow you. Well, Carlyle writes, "Browning's book I read--_insisted_ on reading: it is full of talent, of energy, and effort, but totally without _backbone_, or basis of common sense. I think among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted man." (Italics are his.) Who, then, are the people that write the nonsense in the Reviews? I believe the reason at the bottom is that R. B. is a clever London diner-out, etc., while A. T. holds aloof from the newspaper men, etc. "Long life to him!" But I don't understand why Venables, or some of the men who think as I do, and wield trenchant pens in high places, why they don't come out, and set all this right. I only wish I could do it: but I can only see the right thing, but not prove it to others. "I do not like you, Dr. Fell," etc.