For serving country, king, and commonweal,
(Though service tire to death the body, teaze
The soul from out an o'ertasked patriot-drudge)
And yet should prove zeal's outward show agrees
In all respects--right reason being judge--
With inward care that while the statesman spends
Body and soul thus freely for the sake
Of public good, his private welfare take
No harm by such devotedness.

Thus Robert Browning in Robert Browning's penultimate book, that
"Parleyings with certain people of importance in their day" which fell
somewhat coldly upon all save Browning fanatics, and which, when it
seemed to show that the poet's hand had palsied, served only as the
discordant prelude to the swan song of "Asolando," the last and almost
the greatest of his glories. Perhaps only Browning would ever have
thought of undertaking a poetical parley with Bubb Dodington. Dodington
is now largely, and not undeservedly forgotten. His dinners and his
dresses, his poems and his pamphlets, his plays and his passions--the
wind has carried them all away. If Pope had not nicknamed him Bubo, if
Foote had not caricatured him in "The Patron," if Churchill had not
lampooned him in "The Rosciad," he would scarcely have earned in his own
day the notoriety which the publication of his "Diary" had in a manner
preserved to later days. If he was hardly worth a corner in the
Whartons' picture-gallery he was certainly scarcely deserving of the
attention of Browning. Even his ineptitude was hardly important enough
to have twenty pages of Browning's genius wasted upon it, twenty pages
ending with the sting about

The scoff