which we frequently do, though this famous passage is admittedly an extreme case, we have to deal with something more than the direct removal of common idiom into verse. Apart from actual obscurity of meaning, we have here a poetic style that is strangely elusive in its origin. It is useless to dismiss it as being the mere vagary of a great but wilful poet. Browning in this and many similar passages was deliberately carrying out some technical purpose, and, directed by some instinct or another, was shaping his material as he wished, and not being beaten by it. At the beginning of this essay I suggested that Browning’s distinctive choice of diction was controlled by a feeling, dominating him more and more, that the poetical resources of the language along traditional lines were for the moment exhausted--clearly as he himself disproved the belief in such work as “O lyric love” and “And strew faint sweetness.” For the sake of convenience in this argument we may speak--quite arbitrarily I admit--of Browning’s three characteristics as Tennysonian, Byronic, and the specifically Browningesque,[5] not chronologically but in character. He was not exclusively engaged in any one of these at a given time, but taking the body of his mature work as a whole, it might be said that its common measure is the second of these manners, often brightened by an imaginative strain from the first, and sometimes complicated by the third. This range and variety in his verse remained strictly within his style--it was not a case of style too often subject to manneristic contortions, as has sometimes been suggested. Browning in his manner as well as in his investigation was a very cosmopolitan poet, and he could pass in a single poem from one decided accent to another without any sense of incongruity. This being so, it may be said that the “Browningesque” quality in my category is less typically Browning than the others; the definition should, perhaps, be qualified by adding that it is a quality that he brings from a source of his own unaided discovery into the texture of a style emphatically his own and yet inseparable from tradition. _Shop_, from which the painting butcher and rhyming baker come, shows the three strains blended into a perfectly satisfactory whole. This is the end of the poem. And whither went he? Ask himself, Not me! To change of scene, I think. Once sold the ware and pursed the pelf, Chaffer was scarce his meat and drink, Nor all his music--money-chink. Because a man has shop to mind In time and peace, since flesh must live, Needs spirit lack all life behind, All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive, All loves except what trade can give? I want to know a butcher paints, A baker rhymes for his pursuits, Candlestick-maker much acquaints His soul with song, or, haply mute, Blows out his brains upon the flute.