the man a platform and let him speak for himself.  It is the apologia of a political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly open to popular condemnation.  Mankind has always been somewhat inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves.  We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in the name of compromise.  Browning had to defend, or rather to interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged the Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a regime.  He did these hideous things not so much that he might be able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able to do nothing for twenty years; and Browning’s contention, and a very plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could do.  There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most prosaic kind of villain.  We scarcely ever find in Browning a defence of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama—­the generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for parochial morals.  He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of the outcast.  He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out.  He went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee.

How little this desire of Browning’s, to look for a moment at the man’s life with the man’s eyes, was understood, may be gathered from the criticisms on Hohenstiel-Schwangau, which, says Browning, “the Editor of the Edinburgh Review calls my eulogium on the Second Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England.  It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself.”

In 1873 appeared Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country, which, if it be not absolutely one of the finest of Browning’s poems, is certainly one of the most magnificently Browningesque.  The origin of the name of the poem is probably well known.  He was travelling along the Normandy coast, and discovered what he called

    “Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places,
    Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!”