d Mariana relieved
herself from the fatigue of her posturing, at the same time inviting
Browning with a wink to be a charitable confederate in the joke by which
she profited in admiration and in pelf. Browning, who would have waged
immitigable war against the London dog-stealers, and opposed all treaty
with such rogues, even at the cost of an unrecovered Flush, could not
but oppose the new trade of elaborate deception. But his feeling was
intensified by the personal repulsiveness of the professional medium.
The vain, sleek, vulgar, emasculated, neurotic type of creature, who
became the petted oracle of the dim-lighted room, was loathsome in his
eyes. And his respect for his wife's genius made him feel that there was
a certain desecration in the neighbourhood to her of men whom he
regarded as verminous impostors. Yet he recognised her right to think
for herself, and she, on the other hand, regarded his scepticism as
rather his misfortune than his crime.

It was a considerable time after his wife's death that Browning's study
of the impostor of the spiritualist circles, "Mr Sludge the Medium,"
appeared in the _Dramatis Personae_ of 1864; the date of its composition
is Rome, 1859-60; but the observations which that study sums up were
accumulated during earlier years, and if Mr Sludge is not a portrait of
Home, that eminent member of the tribe of Sludge no doubt supplied
suggestions for the poet's character-study. Browning evidently wrote the
poem with a peculiar zest; its intellectual energy never flags; its
imaginative grip never slackens. If the Bishop, who orders his tomb at
St Praxed's, serves to represent the sensuous glory and the moral void
of one phase of the Italian Renaissance, so, and with equal fidelity,
does Mr Sludge represent a phase of nineteenth century materialism and
moral grossness, which cannot extinguish the cravings of the soul but
would vulgarise and degrade them with coarse illusions. Unhappily the
later poem differs from the earlier in being uglier in its theme and of
inordinate length. Browning, somewhat in the manner of Ben Jonson when
he wrote _The Alchemist_, could not be satisfied until he had exhausted
the subject to the dregs. The writer's zeal from first to last knows no
abatement, but it is not every reader who cares to bend over the
dissecting-table, with its sick effluvia, during so prolonged a
demonstration.

"Mr Sludge the Medium" is not a mere attack on spiritualism; it is a
dramat