ected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. A
Liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by
waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers
of mankind for ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a Liberal
in this sense.

And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the French
Revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human
beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. It
attached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the same
wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems
attached to the life of a man. The grounds were indeed much the same;
no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no one
could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or
must remain useless to the world. Men remembered how often barbarous
tribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revive
the blood of decaying empires and civilisations. And this sense of the
personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all
other nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberals
international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that
friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. But
in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system,
as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as
Carlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough an Englishman as
Browning in love with Italy.

And while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal of
energy and variety, on the other side was something which we now find
it difficult to realise or describe. We have seen in our own time a
great reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, andecclesiasticism,
a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and dwelling almost
entirely on the best periods and the best qualities of the old
_regime_. But the modern man, full of admiration for the great virtue
of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and the great
virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial religion, is
not in a position to form any idea of how profoundly unchivalrous, how
astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and material, and devoid
of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of Europe which
survived, and for a time conquered, the Revolution. The case against
the Church in Italy in the time of Pi