history. His interest is with the failures; why they failed, how often their seeming failure is the highest success, the battling of the brave but weak soul with the might of circumstance—these are the favourite themes of his historic imagination. Hence a somewhat exaggerated impression of the extent of his learning. By the very exigencies of the case his dramatis personæ had to be obscurities, and, owing to his intimate relations with Italy, these were mostly Italian obscurities, of whom Englishmen had no knowledge. Hence the impression, 'If he knows the obscurities so well, how well must he know the greater lights of history!' Put thus, one sees the non sequitur. He sought for the curiosities of history, and found them in volumes of memoirs, causes célèbres, and books like Wanley's Wonders of the Little World. He revived in this one of the favourite topics of the Middle Ages, the Fall of Princes, the Mirror for Magistrates, and his portraits recall the exempla of the mediæval moralists and sermonisers. In this again he was on the search for dramatic situations, and he was chiefly interested in the pathos of disappointment.
It is here that his spiritual influence has been most profound. No English poet has felt like Browning the pathos of the battle of life. Yet keenly as he felt it, he did not
