somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one.

The Browning then who published _Sordello_ we have to conceive, not as
a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public,
but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially
humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from
each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning
with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause
lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat,
and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of
_Sordello_ illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part
of the difficulty of _Sordello_, for instance, is in the fact that
before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of
Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with
an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all
human epochs--the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in
mediaeval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that
impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a
student of mediaeval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning
in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play
cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first
person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra
with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it
talks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this the poem of
_Sordello_, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant
advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented
by _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_. _Pauline, Paracelsus_, and _Sordello_
stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent
phrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, "confessional." All
three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament
finds in itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subject
of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant.
This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in
ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out
in action which our neighbours see. We see only a welter of minute
mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed
by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are
looking at a f