great men who had a certain
peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson,
Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very
strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness
and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain
almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other
influences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without
the least affectation, all the influences of his day. A very
interesting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasure
in a university dinner. "Praise," he says in effect, "was given very
deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of
Oxford men, Clough." The really striking thing about these three names
is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way in
which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in
one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley,"
who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by
making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised
Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:--

"There was a bad poet named Clough,
Whom his friends all united to puff.
But the public, though dull,
Has not quite such a skull
As belongs to believers in Clough."

The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's
life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who
sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled
against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled
interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of
great men who all contemned each other. To say that he had no streak
of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no
justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to
envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain
spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He
admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring
leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in
that department than whether he could be redder than the sunset or
greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the
literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it
rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had
already cast his eyes round in the literary world of