belief in the most ancient of institutions, the average man, which goes by the name of democracy.  It had none of the spirit of modern Imperialism which is kicking a man because he is down.  But, on the other hand, it had none of the spirit of modern Anarchism and scepticism which is kicking a man merely because he is up.  It was based fundamentally on a belief in the destiny of humanity, whether that belief took an irreligious form, as in Swinburne, or a religious form, as in Mrs. Browning.  It had that rooted and natural conviction that the Millennium was coming to-morrow which has been the conviction of all iconoclasts and reformers, and for which some rationalists have been absurd enough to blame the early Christians.  But they had none of that disposition to pin their whole faith to some black-and-white scientific system which afterwards became the curse of philosophical Radicalism.  They were not like the sociologists who lay down a final rectification of things, amounting to nothing except an end of the world, a great deal more depressing than would be the case if it were knocked to pieces by a comet.  Their ideal, like the ideal of all sensible people, was a chaotic and confused notion of goodness made up of English primroses and Greek statues, birds singing in April, and regiments being cut to pieces for a flag.  They were neither Radicals nor Socialists, but Liberals, and a Liberal is a noble and indispensable lunatic who tries to make a cosmos of his own head.

Mrs. Browning and her husband were more liberal than most Liberals.  Theirs was the hospitality of the intellect and the hospitality of the heart, which is the best definition of the term.  They never fell into the habit of the idle revolutionists of supposing that the past was bad because the future was good, which amounted to asserting that because humanity had never made anything but mistakes it was now quite certain to be right.  Browning possessed in a greater degree than any other man the power of realising that all conventions were only victorious revolutions.  He could follow the mediaeval logicians in all their sowing of the wind and reaping of the whirlwind with all that generous ardour which is due to abstract ideas.  He could study the ancients with the young eyes of the Renaissance and read a Greek grammar like a book of love lyrics.  This immense and almost confounding Liberalism of Browning doubtless had some effect upon his wife.  In her vision of New Italy she went back to the image of Ancient Italy like an honest and true revolutionist; for does not the very word “revolution” mean a rolling backward.  All true revolutions are reversions to the natural and the normal.  A revolutionist who breaks with the past is a notion fit for an idiot.  For how could a man even wish for something which he had never heard of?  Mrs. Browning’s inexhaustible sympathy with all the ancient and essential passions of humanity was nowhere more in evidence than in her conception of patriotism.