of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime.  Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the Browning family have every abstract possibility.  But it is a far more cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found similar legends in all of them.  There is hardly a family in Camberwell that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwell family.  The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story, Kingsley’s Water Babies, in which the pedigree of the Professor is treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common sense of the book.  “His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she was born at Curacoa (of course, you have read your geography and therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour’s goods.”

It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much more important, a clear account of his home.  For the great central and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class.  He may have had alien blood, and that alien blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more characteristically a native.  A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class.  Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything but an Englishman of the middle class.  He expanded his intellectual tolerance until it included the anarchism of Fifine at the Fair and the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class.  He pictured all the passions of the earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of Time’s Revenges to the despotic fantasy of Instans Tyrannus; but he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class.  The moment that he came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any opinions, the blood of generations of good men.  He met George Sand and her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city merchant for the irresponsible life.  He met the Spiritualists and hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands and equivocal positions and playing with fire.  His intellect went upon bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road.  He piled up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell.  He abandoned, with a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity.