He very seldom wrote anything that did not mean a great deal.
It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in the smallest degree understand what he is talking about.

He may have intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his diplomas into the air.

These are the sensations with which the true Browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning's critics and biographers about _The Ring and the Book_.

That criticism was embodied by one of them in the words "the theme looked at dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity." Now this remark shows at once that the critic does not know what _The Ring and the Book_ means.

We feel about it as we should feel about a man who said that the plot of _Tristram Shandy_ was not well constructed, or that the women in Rossetti's pictures did not look useful and industrious.