Robert Browning invented the dramatic monologue as English poetry practises it: a single speaker, talking at length to a silent listener, revealing far more than he intends. In "My Last Duchess" a duke shows a marriage broker the portrait of the wife he had killed, and condemns himself in fifty-six lines of perfectly courteous verse. His early work was dismissed as unreadable — Sordello (1840) is still a byword for obscurity — and recognition came slowly through Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864). The Ring and the Book (1868–69), a 21,000-line account of a Roman murder trial told twelve times by twelve speakers, finally made him Tennyson's equal in public standing. In 1846 he eloped with Elizabeth Barrett, six years his senior and an invalid under her father's control, and they lived in Florence until her death in 1861. His poetry is full of casuists, painters, bishops and frauds arguing their own cases, and he trusted his readers to judge them. He died in Venice in 1889 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.