Browning’s hostility arose primarily from his conviction that the so-called “manifestations” were, as he says, a cheat and imposture.  He had grasped Home’s leg under the table while at work in producing “phenomena.”  He had visited his friend, Seymour Kirkup, had found the old man assisting at the trance of a peasant girl named Mariana; and when Kirkup withdrew for a moment, the entranced Mariana relieved herself from the fatigue of her posturing, at the same time inviting Browning with a wink to be a charitable confederate in the joke by which she profited in admiration and in pelf.  Browning, who would have waged immitigable war against the London dog-stealers, and opposed all treaty with such rogues, even at the cost of an unrecovered Flush, could not but oppose the new trade of elaborate deception.  But his feeling was intensified by the personal repulsiveness of the professional medium.  The vain, sleek, vulgar, emasculated, neurotic type of creature, who became the petted oracle of the dim-lighted room, was loathsome in his eyes.  And his respect for his wife’s genius made him feel that there was a certain desecration in the neighbourhood to her of men whom he regarded as verminous impostors.  Yet he recognised her right to think for herself, and she, on the other hand, regarded his scepticism as rather his misfortune than his crime.

It was a considerable time after his wife’s death that Browning’s study of the impostor of the spiritualist circles, “Mr Sludge the Medium,” appeared in the Dramatis Personae of 1864; the date of its composition is Rome, 1859-60; but the observations which that study sums up were accumulated during earlier years, and if Mr Sludge is not a portrait of Home, that eminent member of the tribe of Sludge no doubt supplied suggestions for the poet’s character-study.  Browning evidently wrote the poem with a peculiar zest; its intellectual energy never flags; its imaginative grip never slackens.  If the Bishop, who orders his tomb at St Praxed’s, serves to represent the sensuous glory and the moral void of one phase of the Italian Renaissance, so, and with equal fidelity, does Mr Sludge represent a phase of nineteenth century materialism and moral grossness, which cannot extinguish the cravings of the soul but would vulgarise and degrade them with coarse illusions.  Unhappily the later poem differs from the earlier in being uglier in its theme and of inordinate length.  Browning, somewhat in the manner of Ben Jonson when he wrote The Alchemist, could not be satisfied until he had exhausted the subject to the dregs.  The writer’s zeal from first to last knows no abatement, but it is not every reader who cares to bend over the dissecting-table, with its sick effluvia, during so prolonged a demonstration.