onscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. Probably in a great
many cases, the original impulse which led Browning to plan a
soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the first
charcoal sketch of Blougram was a caricature of a priest. Browning,
as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two
of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly
clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism. But as he
worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him,
and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of
themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end
would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the
man's skin and testify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it is
worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in
connection with one of the most famous of these monologues.

When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with
the spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that he
gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied
in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." The statement so often made, particularly
in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is
the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course
merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has
suffered more than Browning despite his students and societies. The
man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H.
Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more
than once suggested, something of a fool. Nor is there the smallest
reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any
particular resemblance to Home considered as an individual. But
without doubt "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is a general statement of the
view of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from his
acquaintance with Home and Home's circle. And about that view of
spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. The poem,
appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just
become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great
deal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. The
spiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom they
depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed
the profanity of sneering at the