Browning’s circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all directions.  One friend in particular he made, the Comte de Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed energy his studies in the mediaeval and Renaissance schools of philosophy.  It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus.  After reflection, indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history of the great mystic gave no room for love.  Undismayed by this terrible deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he himself regarded as representative—­Paracelsus.  The poem shows an enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of Browning’s mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, an intense love of the holes and corners of history.  Fifty-two years afterwards he wrote Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day, the last poem published in his lifetime; and any reader of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in their day as that they are of no importance in ours.  The same eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote Paracelsus and Sordello.  Nowhere in Browning’s poetry can we find any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the favourites of the poet and moralist.  He has written about philosophy and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about Socrates or Caesar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or Mahomet.  When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia.  When he wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.  When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of Ben Ezra.  It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world.  He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire and pity, the a priori scientist of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist.  It is difficult to imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the ordinary modern point of view.  To the