difficulties that beset his verse he used to be rather impatient of any suggestion that he was difficult, or more difficult than a thinker ought to be, and must be. This he expressed with startling simplicity. "They talk," said Browning one night to a dozen people, "of my being obscure. Do they consider that the commentators have been at work on Shakespeare for 200 years, and have not made him out yet?" "What answer could be made to that?" asks Mr. Smalley, and pauses for a reply. Indeed, we think a very simple answer could be made to that question. Of all Shakespeare's works, the obscurities are very few scarcely two hundred by count, and these mostly in single words, or never more than a line or a line and a half, every one of which are typographical errors of the old copies, and darken nothing but themselves, the phrase or the figure employed-never in a single instance the drift of the passage, still less of the context. Even that ugly "dram of cale"-whatever Shakespeare may have written it raises no possible doubt as to the sentiment expressed. Besides—and to this the ghost of Mr. Browning himself could not rise to demur-had Shakespeare's attention been called to these cruces in his lifetime, he could undoubtedly have set them right, whereas the fact remains that Mr. Browning's personal attention was repeatedly called to his cruces-by the page-in his own lifetime, but that he left the world no wiser. Whether, in this great body of Browning, there is that to dig for, which, when dug up, will reward the digger; whether the world will place him, as none the worse for that neglect of form of which, in his Inn Album, he himself boasts-these are questions not to be settled in a notice like the present. In one thing, surely, Browning has been more fortunate than Shakespeare. He has not had to wait for centuries for Editions de Luxe-nor even seven years for his collected works! Whether, in that the societies organized to do him honor were organized in his own lifetime rather than two centuries after his funeral, he has been more gainer or loser, time alone can tell! NINETEENTH CENTURY. JANUARY, 1890. Price, 40 cents. CONTENTS: ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. JANUARY, 1890. Price, 40 cents. CONTENTS: TWO NEW UTOPIAS. By Emile de Laveleye. drew Lang. THE GERMAN DAILY PRESS. By Dr. MR. WILKIE COLLINS'S NOVELS. ITS OURSELVES AND OUR FOREMOTHERS. THE DECLINE OF RESERVE AMONG THE FUTURE OF THE CITY CHARITIES. THE ACTUAL AND THE POLITICAL ABSOLUTE POLITICAL ETHICS. By Her- THE ASCERTAINMENT OF ENGLISH. By THE DANGERS OF ELECTRIC LIGHT. By An BROTHERHOODS. By the Bishop of Ripon. THE UNFAITHFUL STEWARD. By Julia WHAT STANLEY HAS DONE FOR THE THE GOVERNMENT AND THE TITHES. ROBERT BROWNING. By the Rev. Stopford By the Right Hon. Earl Grey. LEONARD SCOTT PUBLICATION CO., 29 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW. JANUARY, 1890. Price, 40 Cents. CONTENTS: A SEQUENCE OF SONNETS ON THE DEATH OF ROBERT BROWNING. By A. BROOKE. HIS UNCLE AND HER GRANDMOTHER. THE MOUND BY YELLOW CREEK. OPENING UP INDO-CHINA. AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MYSTIC. By LADY BABY. Chaps. 41-42. THE HOMES OF THE POOR. By Mary STANLEY'S EXPEDITION: A RETROSPECT. THE CRETAN INSURRECTION OF 1889. CARDINAL LAVIGERIE AND THE SLAVE ROBERT BROWNING: A SONNET. By Sir A WINTER'S DRIVE FROM SEDAN TO PORTUGAL'S AGGRESSIONS AND ENG. THE OLD SALOON. LEONARD SCOTT PUBLICATION CO., 29 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. THE POLITICAL POSITION. LEONARD SCOTT PUBLICATION CO., 29 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. Leonard Scott Publication Co.'s Periodicals FOR 1890. Nineteenth Century. Contemporary Review. Fortnightly Review. Issued Monthly -Either One, $4.50 Any Two, $8.50; All Three, $12.00 Single Copies, 40 Cts. Westminster Review. Monthly-Per Year, $4.00 Edinburgh Review. Issued Quarterly-Either One, $4.00 With Blackwood's, $13.00 Blackwood's Magazine. Issued Monthly, $3.00 Per Year. 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