One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is the fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife.  “If he is vain of anything,” writes Mrs. Browning, “it is of my restored health.”  Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness, “and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature.”  When a lady in Italy said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the day of a picnic, that he was “the only man who behaved like a Christian to his wife,” Browning was elated to an almost infantile degree.  But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities.  Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated.  Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly conceited of their defects.

One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the Brownings’ life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor.  Browning found him living with some of his wife’s relations, and engaged in a continuous and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings.  He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and stately but almost extinct blend—­the aristocratic republican.  Like an old Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the Southern States of America, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him, combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those above.  The only person who appears to have been able to manage him and bring out his more agreeable side was Browning.  It is, by the way, one of the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only be described by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that he always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of savage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, who could get on with no one else.  Carlyle, who could not get a bitter taste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries, was fond of Browning.  Landor, who could hardly conduct an ordinary business interview without beginning to break the furniture, was fond of Browning.  These are things which speak more for a man than many people will understand.  It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent for discipleship and the absorption of ideas.  But when a man is loved by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something genuine about him, and something far more important than anything intellectual.  Men do not like another man because he is a genius, least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves.  This general truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in by all the women who live there.