What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it is difficult indeed to imagine.  The only plain conclusion which appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one—­that Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises.  Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of Miss Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening passages in a letter consist of dots.  She replies in a letter following the above:  “But if it could be possible that you should mean to say you would show me. . . .  Can it be? or am I reading this ’Attic contraction’ quite the wrong way.  You see I am afraid of the difference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the fatal difference.  And now will you understand that I should be too overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . however incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask impudently of them now?  Is that plain?” Most probably she thought it was.

With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively natural and appropriate.  Browning’s prose was in any case the most roundabout affair in the world.  Those who knew him say that he would often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its object.  This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the theory of Browning’s intellectual conceit.  A man would have to be somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation of his own plans.  The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards.  The words “tail foremost” express Browning’s style with something more than a conventional accuracy.  The tail, the most insignificant part of an animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic.  An utterance of Browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, who flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his head.  He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling the least important thing first.  If a man who belonged to an Italian secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour of olives.  His whole method was founded both in literature and life upon the principle of the “ex pede Herculem,” and at the beginning of his description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than the hero.