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Poet and Teacher in Old Age During the last decade of his life Browning's influence as a literary power was assured. He noted with satisfaction that fourteen hundred copies of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau were sold in five days, and says of Balaustion's Adventure "2500 in five months is a good sale for the likes of me."
There was a steady falling off in power accompanied by a constant increase in his peculiarities during the last twenty years of his life, and we may make some surmise as to how Balaustion's Adventure will strike posterity by reading Parleyings with Certain People. The distinctions between Browning's characters which to us are so vivid will to others seem less so.
So the play is great-hearted and tender, and a covert lash for conventional callousness; and somehow does not quite hang together: leaves you just a little uncomfortable. Browning calls him, in Balaustion's Adventure, ".... Euripides The human, with his droppings of warms tears"; it is a just verdict, perhaps.
In 1871 he produced Balaustion's Adventure, a work exhibiting not only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough assimilation of the vast literature of a remote civilisation.
Balaustion's Adventure, dedicated to the Countess Cowper by whom the transcript from Euripides was suggested, or, as Browning will have it, prescribed, proved, as the dedication declares, "the most delightful of May-month amusements" in the spring of 1871.
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