Another anxiety gave Browning an opportunity which he turned to account in a way that renders honour and gratitude his due from all lovers of English letters.  At a great old age Landor, who resided with his family at Fiesole, still retained his violent and intractable temper; in his home there was much to excite his leonine wrath and sense of intolerable wrong.  Three times he had quitted his villa, with vows never to return to it, and three times he had been led back.  When for a fourth time—­like a feeble yet majestic Lear—­one hot summer day, toward noon, he flung himself, or was flung, out of doors with only a few pauls in his pocket, it was to Casa Guidi that he made his way broken-hearted, yet breathing forth wrath.[73] Browning had often said, as his wife tells her sister-in-law, that he owed more as a writer to Landor than to any other contemporary.[74] He resolved to set things right, if possible; and if not, to make the best of a case that could not be entirely amended.  A visit to the villa assured him that reconciliation was out of the question.  He provided for Landor’s immediate wants; communicated with Landor’s brothers in England, who were prompt in arranging for a regular allowance to be administered by Browning; became the old man’s guide and guardian; soothed his wounded spirit, although, according to Mrs Browning, not often happy when he attempted compliments, with generous words and ready quotations from Landor’s own writings; and finally settled him in Florence under the care of Mrs Browning’s faithful maid Wilson, who watched over him during the remainder of his life.[75] To his incredulous wife Browning spoke of Landor’s sweetness and gentleness, nor was he wrong in ascribing these qualities to the old lion.  She admitted that he had generous impulses, but feared that her husband would before long become, like other friends of Landor, the object of some enraged suspicion.  “Nothing coheres in him,” she writes, “either in his opinions, or, I fear, affections.”  But Landor, whose courtesy and refinement she acknowledges, had also a heart that was capable of loyal love and gratitude.  After the first burst of rage against the Fiesole household had spent itself, he beguiled the time in perpetuating his indignations in an innocent and classical form—­that of Latin alcaics directed against one private and one public foe—­his wife and the Emperor Louis Napoleon.[76]

Lander’s affairs threatened to detain the Brownings in Florence longer than they desired, now that peace had come and it was not indispensable to run out of doors twice a day in order to inspect the bulletins.  But after three weeks of very exhausting illness, Mrs Browning needed change of air.  As soon as her strength allowed, she was lifted into a carriage and they journeyed, as in the year 1850, to the neighbourhood of Siena.  She reached the villa which had been engaged by Story’s aid, with the sense of “a peculiar frailty of being.”  Though confined