No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
In 1876 Robert Browning published Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper: with Other Poems. In the title poem of this volume Browning answers the critics who had been nipping at him for decades, and at the end of it Browning threatens that his housemaid (his muse) might toss the slops from a skoramis (chamber pot) upon their heads. The image of a chamber pot so used is generally thought to be humorous, as it is in Candide's encounter with a Dutch religious zealot or in a similar scene in Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding.