You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.'" Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published _Fifine at the Fair_, which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism.

Perplexing it may be to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card.
But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote.

Cynicism denotes that condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things genuine reliability.

_Fifine at the Fair_, like _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, is one of Browning's apologetic soliloquies--the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards actually falls.

This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the poem is called cynical.