emotion as hers.  His judgment of character was cooler, and with all his proverbial readiness as a poet to provide men of equivocal conduct with hypothetical backgrounds of lofty or blameless motive, he was in practice as exempt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow spite.  Himself the most exact and precise in his dealings with the world, he could pardon the excesses and irregularities of a great nature; but sordid self-seeking under the mask of high ideals revolted him.  He laughed at the boyish freaks of Lander’s magnificent old age, which irritated even his large-hearted wife; but he could not forgive Louis Napoleon the coup d’etat, and when the liberation of Lombardy was followed by the annexation of Savoy and Nice, the Emperor’s devoted defender had to listen, without the power of effective retort, to his biting summary of the situation:  “It was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence for it, which is a pity.”

A dozen years later Louis Napoleon’s equivocal character and career were to be subjected by Browning to a still more equivocal exposition.  But this sordid trait brought him within a category of “soul” upon which Browning did not yet, in these glowing years, readily lavish his art.  A poem upon Napoleon, which had occupied him much during the winter of 1859 (cf. note, p. 167 below), was abandoned.  “Blougram’s” splendid and genial duplicity already attracted him, but the analysis of the meretricious figure of Napoleon became a congenial problem only to that later Browning of the ’Sixties and ’Seventies who was to explore the shady souls of a Guido, a Miranda, and a Sludge.  On the other hand, deeply as he felt the sorrows of Italy, it was no part of his poetic mission to sing them.  The voice of a great community wakened no lyric note in him, nor did his anger on its behalf break into dithyrambs.  Nationality was not an effectual motive with him.  He felt as keenly as his wife, or as Shelley; but his feeling broke out in fitful allusion or sardonic jest in the De Gustibus or the Old Pictures—­not in a Casa Guidi Windows, or Songs before Congress, an Ode to Naples, or a Hellas.  An “Ode” containing, by his own account, fierce things about England, he destroyed after Villafranca.  It is only in subtle and original variations that we faintly recognise the broad simple theme of Italy’s struggle for deliverance.  The Patriot and Instans Tyrannus both have a kind of nexus with the place and time; but the one is a caustic satire on popular fickleness and the other a sardonically humorous travesty of persecution.  Italy is mentioned in neither.  Both are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the national struggle which thrills us in The Italian in England and the third scene of Pippa Passes.  This “tyrant” has nothing to do with the Austrian whom Luigi was so eager to assassinate, or any other:  whatever in him belongs to history has been permeated through and through with the poet’s derisive irony; he is despotism stripped of the passionate conviction which may lend it weight and political significance, reduced to a kind of sport, like the chase of a butterfly, and contemplating its own fantastic tricks with subdued amusement.