His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual eminence.  Lockhart said briefly, “I like Browning; he isn’t at all like a damned literary man.”  He was, according to some, upon occasion, talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who monopolise conversation.  The first kind are those who like the sound of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the sound of their own voice is like.  Browning was one of the latter class.  His volubility in speech had the same origin as his voluminousness and obscurity in literature—­a kind of headlong humility.  He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people down or have wished to do so.  For this would have been precisely a violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and even weakness that he had.  He wished to be a man of the world, and he never in the full sense was one.  He remained a little too much of a boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world.

One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice.  On the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he was in a certain degree fierce and irrational.  He was not indeed, as we shall see when we come to study “Sludge the Medium,” exactly prejudiced against spiritualism.  But he was beyond all question stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists.  Whether the medium Home was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to conjecture.  But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived.  And even if we think that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious character, we can still feel that Browning might have achieved his purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so.  Some traces again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than might have been expected of a man of Browning’s great imaginative tolerance.  AEstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the artist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, he hated with a consuming hatred.  He was himself exact in everything, from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their own way as precise as a dress suit.  This extra carefulness in all things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the right attitude for the poet.  When some one excused coarseness or negligence on the ground of genius, he said, “That is an error:  Noblesse oblige.”