alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human
types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of the
world, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who act
symbols and become legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his red
shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort
calling to the coachman to drive slower, and not a man dared fire a
shot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism of
humanity and liberty, and was willing, like some passionate Jesuit of
the sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a philosopher or
a criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and
picturesque than war itself. These men had nothing to do with an age
of the impossible. They have passed, their theories along with them,
as all things pass; but since then we have had no men of their type
precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. Gordon
was a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes.

When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been
sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of
his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible
for people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how a
small thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much the
obvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him;
that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital
moment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on
something personal and essentially free. Tyranny like this is not the
worst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with men
not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in
which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to
accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational
systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient
system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a
post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a
strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world
who would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in a
city like a mediaeval Ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to
smoke another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardly
a man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellion
for a caprice for whic