to have been born a dog or an elephant.  It would require enormous imagination to reconstruct the political ideals of Strafford.  Now Browning, as we all know, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying that Strafford had any political ideals at all.  That is to say, while crediting Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon his passionate personal attachment to the King.  This is unsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of the political play.  That difficulty, in the case of any political problem, is, as has been said, great.  It would be very hard, for example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill.  It would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five acts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated as that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age of Strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotest commonwealths of the East and West.  But we should scarcely be satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr. Gladstone’s action in the Home Rule question to an overwhelming personal affection for Mr. Healy.  And in thus basing Strafford’s action upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does some injustice to the political greatness, of Strafford.  To attribute Mr. Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule to an infatuation such as that suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the writer thought the Home Rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one.  Similarly, Browning’s choice of a motive for Strafford has very much the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public grounds for Strafford’s political ideal.  Now this is certainly not the case.  The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I. may have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it is a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic.  In Browning’s play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit, and Strafford of private ties.  But not only may an upholder of despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders of it like Strafford he generally is.  Despotism indeed, and attempts at despotism, like that of Strafford, are a kind of disease of public spirit.  They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility.  It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything themselves.  Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with mankind.  They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in personal and public affairs—­the position of the man who has lost faith and not lost love.  This belief that all would go right if we could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost without exception, but nobody can justly