When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with the spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that he gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied in “Mr. Sludge the Medium.”  The statement so often made, particularly in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has suffered more than Browning despite his students and societies.  The man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H. Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more than once suggested, something of a fool.  Nor is there the smallest reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any particular resemblance to Home considered as an individual.  But without doubt “Mr. Sludge the Medium” is a general statement of the view of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from his acquaintance with Home and Home’s circle.  And about that view of spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice.  The poem, appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great deal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy.  The spiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom they depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed the profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life, but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions of his own wife.  The sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem with delight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated the poet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view of magic.  Which of these two parties was right about the question of attacking the reality of spiritualism it is neither easy nor necessary to discuss.  For the simple truth, which neither of the two parties and none of the students of Browning seem to have noticed, is that “Mr. Sludge the Medium” is not an attack upon spiritualism.  It would be a great deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it a justification of spiritualism.  The whole essence of Browning’s method is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of Browning’s method is so vitally misunderstood that to say that “Mr. Sludge the Medium” is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear on the face of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes.  But so, when we have comprehended Browning’s spirit, the fact will be found to be.