the writer, not Mrs. Browning the woman. But Browning could be no dispassionate observer of the slightest aspersion on his wife, and in a spirit of almost boyish gallantry struck out on behalf of the wife who had been taken from his side more than a quarter of a century.
This is, perhaps, the place to treat of Browning's humour—a necessary side of a complete poetic nature, indeed of any complete man. Browning's gift in this direction was large, as witness the Piper, The Two Poets of Croisic, and the whole series of studies of humbugs and nonentities to which we have referred. But it is somewhat one-sided, allied to his interest in the pathetic, and thus somewhat grim. But it is never cynical, except when dealing with cynics; and though it is rarely hearty or a direct object of his art, it is always refined and manly. Mr. Ruskin, in a passage remarkable for its insight and for the quarter whence it comes, notices how inevitably the strongest English poetic force tends to degenerate into coarseness. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Byron, are instances of what he means. Browning is the exception to the rule—he has the strength of these, but he has not their coarseness—and here again we probably have to thank the influence of the Lyric Love
