n this later middle age
of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized,
well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as
almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard,
the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an
indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she
said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods.
His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time
must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F. Watts's fine portrait
in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many
testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts's grasp of the essential of
character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in
which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility,
tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the
brain-worker. He looks here what he was--a very healthy man, too
scholarly to live a completely healthy life.

His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that
of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual
eminence. Lockhart said briefly, "I like Browning; he isn't at all
like a damned literary man." He was, according to some, upon occasion,
talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who
monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound
of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the
sound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter
class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his
voluminousness and obscurity in literature--a kind of headlong
humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people
down or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely a
violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and
even weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he
never in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of a
boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of
what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world.

One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On
the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he
was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as
we shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly
prejudiced against spiritualism.