It's Robert Browning's misfortune to be more often remembered as material for jokes or as the victim of humiliation than as the author of Men and Women, Dramatis Personae and The Ring and the Book. There's Oscar Wilde's gag that "Meredith was a prose Browning, and so was Browning". Or Jane Carlyle's uncertainty, after having read the lengthy, obscure narrative poem Sordello, as to whether Sordello was "a man, a city, or a book". Has any other leading author been so regular an object of mockery? Even Henry James could not resist it, reporting after a reading by the poet...