Painting in these later days of Browning's has ceased to yield high, or even serious poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of _Holy-Cross Day_, while it wholly lacks the great lift of Hebraic sublimity at the close.

The _Epilogue_ returns to the combative apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply to the cavils of the discontented.

They cannot have the strong and the sweet--body and bouquet--at once, he tells them in effect, and he chooses to be strong, to give the good grape and leave the cowslips growing in the meadow.

The argument was but another sally of the poet's good-humoured chaff, and would not have stood the scrutiny of his subtler mind.

Doubtless he, like Ben Jonson, inclined to see signs of the "strong" in the astringent and the gritty; but no one knew better, when he chose, to wed his "strength" with "sweetness." The falling-off of the present volume compared with _Men and Women_ or _Dramatis Personae_ lay less in the lack of either quality than in his failure to bring them together.