human
whose intrusive visit broke in upon
gpt
Neither their importance in their own day nor their relative obscurity, for the most part, in ours, had much to do with Browning's choice. They do not illustrate merely his normal interest in the obscure freaks and out-of-the-way anomalies of history. The doings of these
human
had once been
gpt
to Browning himself, and the old man's memory summoned up these forgotten old-world friends of his boyhood to be championed or rallied by their quondam disciple. The death of the dearest friend of his later life, J. Milsand, in 1886, probably set these chords vibrating; the book is dedicated to his memory. Perhaps the _Imaginary Conversations_ of an older friend and master of Browning's, one even more important in Browning's day and in ours than in his own, and the master of his youth, once more suggested the scheme. But these _Parleyings_ are conversations only in name. They are not even monologues of the old brilliantly dramatic kind. All the dramatic zest of converse is gone, the personages are the merest shadows, nothing is seen but the old poet haranguing his puppets or putting voluble expositions of his own cherished dogmas into their wooden lips. We have glimpses of the boy, when not yet able to compass an octave, beating time to the simple but stirring old march of Avison
human
; and before he has done, the memory masters him, and the pedestrian blank verse breaks into a hymn
gpt
to Pym the
human
Or he calls up Bernard Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend Carlyle--
gpt
Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of art--the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this