objected not to an opinion, but to a social tone.  The truth was that Browning had a great many admirably Philistine feelings, and one of them was a great relish for his responsibilities towards his wife.  He enjoyed being a husband.  This is quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will scarcely be found apart from it.  But, like all good feelings, it has its possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbid healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife.

David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 1857.  Mrs. Browning undoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardour at first, and Browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length forbade, the enterprise.  He did not do so however until he had attended one seance at least, at which a somewhat ridiculous event occurred, which is described in Home’s Memoirs with a gravity even more absurd than the incident.  Towards the end of the proceedings a wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights being lowered, it was caused to rise slowly into the air, and after hovering for some time, to move towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alight upon her head.  As the wreath was floating in her direction, her husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her.  One would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of a man whose wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experiment, genuine or otherwise.  But Mr. Home gravely asserts that it was generally believed that Browning had crossed the room in the hope that the wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of its disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and malignant aversion to spiritualism.  The idea of the very conventional and somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after a wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one of the genuine gleams of humour in this rather foolish affair.  Browning could be fairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but it would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and said if Mr. Home’s wreath had alighted on his head.

Next day, according to Home’s account, he called on the hostess of the previous night in what the writer calls “a ridiculous state of excitement,” and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he and his wife did not attend any more gatherings of the kind.  What actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the account in Home’s Memoirs principally consists of noble speeches made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning to a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention.  But there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was that Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased.  There can be little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probably even more justified if the experiments were genuine