st all the books he
had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre-eminent among those great
universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended
existence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinship
with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who
praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have
lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world
good because he had found so many things that were good in
it--religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not,
like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found
so many things in it that were bad.

As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and
dangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning. If one of
these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the
better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted
in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to
loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his
rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far
removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can only
be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or
presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon the bones of
Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any
one who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work.
Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs.
Browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a
_Life_ founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning
would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he
did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must
have thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of these
black-guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. Again he writes:
"Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those
of her family, worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stop
the scamp's knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning actually
resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except
that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him
to silence, probably from stupefaction.

The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to
any one who knew anything of Browning's literar