One can compare the poem to nothing in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy.

This is the kind of thing, and it goes on for pages:-- "Long after the last of your number Has ceased my front-court to encumber While, treading down rose and ranunculus, You _Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle_-us! Troop, all of you man or homunculus, Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid, If once on your pates she a souse made With what, pan or pot, bowl or _skoramis_, First comes to her hand--things were more amiss! I would not for worlds be your place in-- Recipient of slops from the basin! You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!" You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the brute-force of language.
In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he was unequalled.

Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears and Scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax-- "Hush, I pray you! What if this friend happen to be--God." It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary quality, Sensationalism.
The volume entitled _Pacchiarotto_, moreover, includes one or two of the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to publicity--"At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop." In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed if anything to come thicker and faster.

Two were published in 1878--_La Saisiaz_, his great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that delightfully foppish fragment of the _ancien regime_, _The Two Poets of Croisic_.

Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of humour.