y work. A great number
of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more
or less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it is
truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross
word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral
license into Victorian poetry. What the Non-conformist conscience has
been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine.
But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is
this--that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury and
contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seems
to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only
speak of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhaps
undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same
brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people
who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At the
Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart
of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner
rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially
base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that
the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne.
Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the
average man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesque
hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many
people suppose.

Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the
full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began
to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about
this time. For the first time friendship grew between him and the
other great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and always
felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his
life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There began
to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent
made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is
unread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the
great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death,
despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord
Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep
and somewhat characteristic aversion to fo