With the exception of the closing essay, the contents of this book represent a garnering of various articles on the poetry of Browning printed during the course of years in scholarly journals. During the sixty-five years after Browning’s death, his poetic reputation varied as widely as in his lifetime, and from the time of the publication of The Ring and the Book in 1868-69 until his death in 1889, his niche beside Tennyson as one of the two master poets of the Victorian era was secure. Criticism was succeeded by panegyric, reaching its acme into the adulation of the Browning society and its mushroom offshoots in England and America. In this second edition, three articles on Browning and his poetry written after the first edition have been added.