Rossetti enters in his diary after a conversation with Browning (15 March 1868), "he writes day by day on a regular systematic plan--some three hours in the early part of the day; he seldom or never, unless in quite brief poems, feels the inspiring impulse and sets the thing down into words at the same time--often stores up a subject long before he writes it.

He has written his forthcoming work all consecutively--not some of the later parts before the earlier."[99] When Carlyle met Browning after the appearance of _The Ring and the Book_, he desired to be complimentary, but was hardly more felicitous than Browning himself had sometimes been when under a like necessity: "It is a wonderful book," declared Carlyle, "one of the most wonderful poems ever written.

I re-read it all through--all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting."[100] A like remark might have been made respecting the book which, in its method and its range of all English books most resembles Browning's poem, and which may indeed be said to take among prose works of fiction a similar place to that held among poetical creations by Browning's tale of Guido and Pompilia.

Richardson's _Clarissa_ consists of eight volumes made out of an Old Bailey story, or what might have been such, which one short newspaper paragraph could have dismissed to a happy or sorrowful oblivion.

But then we should never have known two of the most impressive figures invented by the imagination of man, Clarissa and her wronger; and had we not heard their story from all the participators and told with Richardson's characteristic interest in the microscopy of the human heart, it could never have possessed our minds with that full sense of its reality which is the experience of every reader.