And like an unruly child the public struggled against the dose.
Whereupon the poet was likely to lose his temper, and declare, as
Browning did,

My Thirty-four Port, no need to waste
On a tongue that's fur, and a palate--paste!
A magnum for friends who are sound: the sick--
I'll posset and cosset them, nothing loath,
Henceforward with nettle-broth.
[Footnote: _Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto Volume._]

Yes, much as we pity the forlorn poet when his sensitive feelings are
hurt by the world's cruelty, we must still pronounce that he is partly
to blame. If the public is buzzing around his head like a swarm of angry
hornets, he must in most cases admit that he has stirred them up with a
stick.

The poet's vilified contemporaries employ various means of retaliating.
They may invite him to dinner, then point out that His Omniscience does
not know how to manage a fork, or they may investigate his family tree,
and then cut his acquaintance, or, most often, they may listen to his
fanciful accounts of reality, then brand him as a liar. So the vicious
circle is completed, for the poet is harassed by this treatment into the
belief that he is the target for organized persecution, and as a result
his egotism grows more and more morbid, and his contempt for the public
more deliberately expressed.

At the beginning of the period under discussion the social snubs seem to
have rankled most in the poet's nature. This was doubtless a survival