hing else at the expense of poetry.
Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error which
every man would desire to have made.

One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is the
fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction
about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in
relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. "If he is
vain of anything," writes Mrs. Browning, "it is of my restored
health." Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness,
"and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody
how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a
wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature." When a lady in Italy
said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the
day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a
Christian to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile
degree. But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential
manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities.
Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men
everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated.
Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly
conceited of their defects.

One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the
Brownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor. Browning found him
living with some of his wife's relations, and engaged in a continuous
and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the
condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings.
He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and
stately but almost extinct blend--the aristocratic republican. Like an
old Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the Southern States of
America, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him,
combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those
above. The only person who appears to have been able to manage him and
bring out his more agreeable side was Browning. It is, by the way, one
of the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only be
described by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that he
always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of
savage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, who
could get on with no one else. Carlyle, wh