elements in his character and work are more than the Italian.  His intellect was English, and had the English faults as well as the English excellences.  His optimism was English; his steadfast fighting quality, his unyielding energy, his directness, his desire to get to the root of things, were English.  His religion was the excellent English compromise or rather balance of dogma, practice and spirituality which laymen make for their own life.  His bold sense of personal freedom was English.  His constancy to his theories, whether of faith or art, was English; his roughness of form was positively early Teutonic.

Then his wit, his esprit,[3] his capacity for induing he skin and the soul of other persons at remote times of history; his amazing inventiveness and the ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature.  But the ardour of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his impulse towards the infinite and the constant rush he made into its indefinite realms; the special set of his imagination towards the fulfillment of perfection in Love; his vision of Nature as in colour, rather than in light and shade; his love of beauty and the kind of beauty that he loved; his extraordinary delight in all kinds of art as the passionate shaping of part of the unapproachable Beauty—­these were all old Italian.

Then I do not know whether Browning had any Jewish blood in his body by descent, but he certainly had Jewish elements in his intellect, spirit and character.  His sense of an ever-victorious Righteousness at the centre of the universe, whom one might always trust and be untroubled, was Jewish, but he carried it forward with the New Testament and made the Righteousness identical with absolute Love.  Yet, even in this, the Old Testament elements were more plainly seen than is usual among Christians.  The appearance of Christ as all-conquering love in Easter-Day and the scenery which surrounds him are such as Ezekiel might have conceived and written.  Then his intellectual subtlety, the metaphysical minuteness of his arguments, his fondness for parenthesis, the way in which he pursued the absolute while he loaded it with a host of relatives, and conceived the universal through a multitude of particulars, the love he had for remote and unexpected analogies, the craft with which his intellect persuaded him that he could insert into his poems thoughts, illustrations, legends, and twisted knots of reasoning which a fine artistic sense would have omitted, were all as Jewish as the Talmud.  There was also a Jewish quality in his natural description, in the way he invented diverse phrases to express different