eds, with
a sustaining hope which extends into the future. On the other hand, if
your affair is not the sincerity of thought and feeling, but a design to
rule the mass of men for your own advantage, you must act in a different
spirit. Do not, in the manner of Bubb Doddington, attempt to impose upon
your fellows with the obvious and worn-out pretence that all you do has
been undertaken on their behalf and in their interests. There is a newer
and a better trick than that. Assume the supernatural; have a "mission
"; have a "message"; be earnest, with all the authority of a divine
purpose. Play boldly this new card of statesmanship, and you may have
from time to time as many inconsistent missions and messages as
ambitious statecraft can suggest to you. Through all your gyrations the
admiring crowd will still stand agape. Was Browning's irony of a cynical
philosophy of statesmanship suggested by his view of the procedure of a
politician, whom he had once admired, whose talents he still recognised,
but from whom he now turned away with indignant aversion? However this
may have been, his poems which touch on politics do not imply that
respect for the people thinking, feeling, and moving, in masses which is
a common profession with the liberal leaders of the platform. Browning's
liberalism was a form of his individualism; he, like Shakespeare, had a
sympathy with the wants and affections of the humblest human lives; and,
like Shakespeare, he thought that foolish or incompetent heads are
often conjoined with hearts that in a high degree deserve respect.

_Asolando_, the last volume of a long array, was published in London on
the last day of Browning's life. As he lay dying in Venice, telegraphed
tidings reached his son of the eager demand for copies made in
anticipation of its appearance and of the instant and appreciative
reviews; Browning heard the report with a quiet gratification. It is
happy when praise in departing is justified, and this was the case with
a collection of poems which to some readers seemed like a revival of the
poetry of its author's best years of early and mid manhood. _Asolando_
is, however, in the main distinctly an autumn gathering, a handful of
flowers and fruit belonging to the Indian summer of his genius. The
Prologue is a confession, like that of Wordsworth's great Ode, that a
glory has passed away from the earth. When first he set eyes on Asolo,
some fifty years previously, the splendour of Italian