deaf to a hypothesis merely because it was odd.  He had friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the French legitimism of De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism of Landor.  Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies.  It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of “Caliban” and the morality of “Time’s Revenges.”  It is true that at this time of the first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a superstition against believing in ghosts.  But, intellectually speaking, Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant and curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular version of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even for that time.  The fact was in all probability that Browning’s aversion to the spiritualists had little or nothing to do with spiritualism.  It arose from quite a different side of his character—­his uncompromising dislike of what is called Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit dubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all irresponsibility.  Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was that Browning disliked need only do two things.  First, he should read the Memoirs of David Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom Browning came in contact.  These Memoirs constitute a more thorough and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning ever wrote.  The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part of the narrative.  But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral and intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating perhaps in the disgusting passage in which Home describes Mrs. Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband’s actions in the matter have been adopted against her will.  It is in this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of Browning.  He did not dislike spiritualism, but spiritualists.  The second point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter should cast an eye, is the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insisted on making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of George Sand.  Browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the same aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which he afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home.  The society was “of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical, men who worship George Sand, a genou bas between an oath and an ejection of saliva.”  When we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or Atheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the early occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly right in concluding that he