Browning’s prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance.  It never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows nothing about.  It is the hating of a thing when we do know something about it which corrodes the character.  We all have a dark feeling of resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly dislike of the authors we have never read.  It does not harm a man to be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style.  It is the man who can think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair way to mental perdition.  Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, “postjudice,” not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that remains afterwards.  With Browning’s swift and emphatic nature the bias was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter.  But almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he had really read he enjoyed.  He stands pre-eminent among those great universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended existence like any other material, in its samples.  He had no kinship with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have lived under, and all the ties they have known.  He thought the world good because he had found so many things that were good in it—­religion, the nation, the family, the social class.  He did not, like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found so many things in it that were bad.

As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and dangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning.  If one of these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the better pleased.  But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin.  It can only be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or presentable savage.  The indecent fury which danced upon the bones of Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any one who had known much of Browning’s character or even of his work.  Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs. Browning’s letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a Life founded upon them.  They ought to have understood that Browning would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must have thought he was mad.  “What I suffer with the paws of these