statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low estate, men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them.  He has found and studied humanity, not only in English towns and villages, in the glare of gaslight and under the open sky, but on the Roman Campagna, in Venetian gondolas, in Florentine streets, on the Boulevards of Paris and in the Prado of Madrid, in the snow-bound forests of Russia, beneath the palms of Persia and upon Egyptian sands, on the coasts of Normandy and the salt plains of Brittany, among Druses and Arabs and Syrians, in brand-new Boston and amidst the ruins of Thebes.  But this infinite variety has little in it of mere historic or social curiosity.  I do not think Browning has ever set himself the task of recording the legend of the ages, though to some extent he has done it.  The instinct of the poet seizes on a type of character, the eye of the painter perceives the shades and shapes of line and colour and form required to give it picturesque prominence, and the learning of the scholar then sets up a fragment of the broken past, or re-fashions a portion of the living present, as an appropriate and harmonious scene or background.  The statue is never dwarfed by the pedestal.

The characteristic of which I have been speaking (the persistent care for the individual and personal, as distinguished from the universal and general) while it is the secret of his finest achievements, and rightly his special charm, is of all things the most alien to the ordinary conceptions of poetry, and the usual preferences for it.  The popularity of rare and delicate poetry, which condescends to no cheap bids for it, poetry like Tennyson’s, for instance, is largely due to the very quality which Browning’s finest characteristic excludes from his.  Compare, altogether apart from the worth and workmanship, one of Tennyson’s with one of Browning’s best lyrics.  The perfection of the former consists in the exquisite way in which it expresses feelings common to all.  The perfection of the latter consists in the intensity of its expression of a single moment of passion or emotion, one peculiar to a single personality, and to that personality only at a single moment.  To appreciate it we must enter keenly and instantaneously into the imaginary character at its imagined crisis; and, even when this is easiest to do, it is evident that there must be more difficulty in doing it (for it requires a certain exertion) than in merely letting the mind lie at rest, accepting and absorbing.  And the difficulty is increased when we remember another of Browning’s characteristics, closely allied to this, and, indeed, resulting from it:  his preference for the unusual and complex rather than the simple and ordinary.  People prefer to read about characters which they can understand at first sight, with which they can easily sympathise.  A dramatist, who insists