Few have fulfilled it so well.

None, since Shakespeare, have had a wider range.

His portraiture of life was so much more varied than that of Tennyson, so much more extensive and detailed, that on this side he excels Tennyson; but such portraiture is not necessarily poetic, and when it is fond of the complex, it is always in danger of tending to prose.

And Browning, picturing human life, deviated too much into the delineation of its more obscure and complex forms.

It was in his nature to do and love this kind of work; and indeed it has to be done, if human life is to be painted fully.