black-guards in my bowels you can fancy,” he says.  Again he writes:  “Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those of her family, worthy of notice.  It shall not be done if I can stop the scamp’s knavery along with his breath.”  Whether Browning actually resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him to silence, probably from stupefaction.

The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to any one who knew anything of Browning’s literary work.  A great number of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more or less impossible to give examples.  Suffice it to say that it is truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral license into Victorian poetry.  What the Non-conformist conscience has been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine.  But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is this—­that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury and contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly.  The poet seems to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only speak of them in pothouse words.  It would be idle, and perhaps undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in “At the Mermaid,” about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart of humanity.  In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne.  Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the average man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesque hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many people suppose.

Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about this time.  For the first time friendship grew between him and the other great men of his time.  Tennyson, for whom he then and always felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave.  There began to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is unread.  He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death, despite many refusals on his part.  He was unanimously elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University in 1875.  He declined, owing to his