Paracelsus was in all likelihood Browning’s introduction to the literary world.  It was many years, and even many decades, before he had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his standard upon the publication of Paracelsus.  The celebrated John Forster had taken up Paracelsus “as a thing to slate,” and had ended its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works.  John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem.  Among other early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Horne, Serjeant Talfourd, and Monckton-Milnes.  One man of even greater literary stature seems to have come into Browning’s life about this time, a man for whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust.  Browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who got on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle.  It is precisely one of those little things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most other poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachment to him.  He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of dining with him.  Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all companies.  “I have just seen dear Carlyle,” he writes on one occasion; “catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter beginning.”  He sided with Carlyle in the vexed question of the Carlyle domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she was “a hard unlovable woman.”  As, however, it is on record that he once, while excitedly explaining some point of mystical philosophy, put down Mrs. Carlyle’s hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural explanation.  His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which was characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on the character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its friends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty.  Browning was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled Tennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought never to have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there would have been four miserable people instead of two.

Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begun to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than that of Macready the actor.  This extraordinary person, a man living from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man feeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attraction towards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a great play.  Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as Macready.  He immediately began to plan out a great historical play, and selected for his subject “Strafford.”