nce between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the
fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too
overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . however
incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask
impudently of them now? Is that plain?" Most probably she thought it
was.

With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively
natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most
roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would
often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible
to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its
object. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the
theory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to be
somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the
pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation
of his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of
his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. The words
"tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a
conventional accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of an
animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of
Browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, who
flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his
head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical
utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling
the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian
secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an
olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational
interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the
story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been
incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour
of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life
upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," and at the beginning of
his description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than
the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have
written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his
publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it
is somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyond
all question, a quite si