commence author? The third, How long did he keep at it? The fourth,
How much has he written? And the fifth may perhaps be best expressed
in the words of Southey's little Peterkin:

'"What good came of it all at last?"
Quoth little Peterkin.'

Mr. Browning was born in 1812; he commenced author with the fragment
called 'Pauline,' published in 1833. He is still writing, and his
works, as they stand upon my shelves--for editions vary--number
twenty-three volumes. Little Peterkin's question is not so easily
answered; but, postponing it for a moment, the answers to the other
four show that we have to deal with a poet, more than seventy years
old, who has been writing for half a century, and who has filled
twenty-three volumes. The Browning Society at all events has assets.
The way I propose to deal with this literary mass is to divide it in
two, taking the year 1864 as the line of cleavage. In that year the
volume called 'Dramatis Personae' was published, and then nothing
happened till the year 1868, when our poet presented the astonished
English language with the four volumes and the 21,116 lines called
'The Ring and the Book,' a poem which it may be stated, for the
benefit of that large, increasing, and highly interesting class of
persons who prefer statistics to poetry, is longer than Pope's
'Homer's Iliad' by exactly 2,171 lines. We thus begin with 'Pauline'
in 1833, and end with 'Dramatis Personae' in 1864. We then begin again
with 'The Ring and the Book,' in 1868; but when or where we shall end
cannot be stated. 'Sordello,' published in 1840, is better treated
apart, and is therefore excepted from the first period, to which
chronologically it belongs.