Men understood
    Living was pleasant to him as he wore
    His careless surcoat, glanced some missive o’er,
    Propped on his truncheon in the public way.

Then at the games at Mantua, when he is told Sordello will not come to sing a welcome to him.  What cares he for poet’s whims?

    The easy-natured soldier smiled assent,
    Settled his portly person, smoothed his chin,
    And nodded that the bull-bait might begin.

Then mad with fighting frenzy in the sacking of Vicenza, then in his palace nursing his scheme to make the Emperor predominant, then pacing like a lion, hot with hope of mastering all Italy, when he finds out that Sordello is his son:  “hands clenched, head erect, pursuing his discourse—­crimson ear, eyeballs suffused, temples full fraught.”

Then in the fourth book there is a long portrait of him which I quote as a full specimen of the power with which Browning could paint a partisan of the thirteenth century.  Though sixty years old, Salinguerra looked like a youth—­

                So agile, quick
    And graceful turned the head on the broad chest
    Encased in pliant steel, his constant vest,
    Whence split the sun off in a spray of fire
    Across the room; and, loosened of its tire
    Of steel, that head let breathe the comely brown
    Large massive locks discoloured as if a crown
    Encircled them, so frayed the basnet where
    A sharp white line divided clean the hair;
    Glossy above, glossy below, it swept
    Curling and fine about a brow thus kept
    Calm, laid coat upon coat, marble and sound: 
    This was the mystic mark the Tuscan found,
    Mused of, turned over books about.  Square-faced,
    No lion more; two vivid eyes, enchased
    In hollows filled with many a shade and streak
    Settling from the bold nose and bearded cheek. 
    Nor might the half-smile reach them that deformed
    A lip supremely perfect else—­unwarmed,
    Unwidened, less or more; indifferent
    Whether on trees or men his thoughts were bent,
    Thoughts rarely, after all, in trim and train
    As now a period was fulfilled again: 
    Of such, a series made his life, compressed
    In each, one story serving for the rest.

This is one example of a gallery of vivid portraiture in all Browning’s work, such as Carlyle only in the nineteenth century has approached in England.  It is not a national, but an international gallery of portraits.  The greater number of the portraits are Italian, and they range over all classes of society from the Pope to the peasant.  Even Bishop Blougram has the Italian subtlety, and, like the Monsignore in Pippa Passes, something of the politic morality of Machiavelli.  But Israel, Greece, France, Spain, Germany, and the days before the world was brought together, furnish him with men drawn as alive.