This is an excellent reason for the faith that was in Browning; he holds that individual progress depends on individual freedom, and by that word he understands not only political freedom but also emancipation from intellectual narrowness and the bondage of injurious convention.  But Browning in his verse, setting aside the early Strafford, nowhere celebrates a popular political movement; he nowhere chaunts a paean, in the manner of Byron or Shelley, in honour of the abstraction “Liberty.”  Nor does he anywhere study political phenomena or events except as they throw light upon an individual character.  Things and persons that gave him offence he could summarily dismiss from his mind—­“Thiers is a rascal; I make a point of not reading one word said by M. Thiers”; “Proudhon is a madman; who cares for Proudhon?” “The President’s an ass; he is not worth thinking of."[41] This may be admirable economy of intellectual force; but it is not the way to understand the course of public events; it does not indicate a political or a historical sense.  And, indeed, his writings do not show that Browning possessed a political or a historical sense in any high degree, save as a representative person may be conceived by him as embodying a phase of civilisation.  When Mrs Trollope called at Casa Guidi, Browning was only reluctantly present; she had written against liberal institutions and against the poetry of Victor Hugo, and that was enough.  Might it not have been more truly liberal to be patient and understand the grounds of her prejudice?  “Blessed be the inconsistency of men!” exclaimed Mrs Browning, for whose sake he tolerated the offending authoress until by and by he came to like in her an agreeable woman.

On the anniversary of their wedding day Browning and his wife saw from their window a brilliant procession of grateful and enthusiastic Florentines stream into the Piazza.  Pitti with banners and vivas for the space of three hours and a half It was the time when the Grand Duke was a patriot and Pio Nono was a liberal.  The new helmets and epaulettes of the civic guard proclaimed the glories of genuine freedom.  The pleasure of the populace was like that of children, and perhaps it had some serious feeling behind it.  The incomparable Grand Duke had granted a liberal constitution, and was led back from the opera to the Pitti by the torchlights of a cheering crowd—­“through the dark night a flock of stars seemed sweeping up the piazza.”  A few months later, and the word of Mrs Browning is “Ah, poor Italy”; the people are attractive, delightful, but they want conscience and self reverence.[42] Browning and she painfully felt that they grew cooler and cooler on the subject of Italian patriotism.  A revolution had been promised, but a shower of rain fell and the revolution was postponed.  Now it was the Grand Duke out, and the bells rang, and a tree of liberty was planted close to the door of Casa Guidi; six weeks later it was the Grand Duke