human
they looked forth upon the gentle futilities of the Tuscan revolution, the nine days' fight for Milan, the heroic adventure of Savoy, and the apparently final collapse of all these high endeavours on the field of Novara. Ten years of petty despotism on the one side, of
gpt
on the other, followed; and then the monotonous tragedy seemed to break suddenly into romance, as the Emperor,
human
But he had not her passionate admiration for France, still less her faith in the President-Emperor. His less lyric temperament did not so readily harbour unqualified emotion as hers. His judgment of character was cooler, and with all his proverbial readiness as a poet to provide men of equivocal conduct with hypothetical backgrounds of lofty or blameless motive, he was in practice as exempt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow spite. Himself the most exact and precise in his dealings with the world, he could pardon the excesses and irregularities of a great nature; but sordid self-seeking under the mask of high ideals revolted him. He laughed at the boyish freaks of Lander's magnificent old age, which irritated even his large-hearted wife; but he could not forgive Louis Napoleon the _coup d'état_, and when the liberation of Lombardy was followed by the annexation of Savoy and Nice, the Emperor's devoted defender had to listen, without the power of effective retort, to his biting summary of the situation:
gpt
It was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence for it, which is a pity.
human
upon which Browning did not yet, in these glowing years, readily lavish his art. A poem upon Napoleon, which had occupied him much during the winter of 1859 (cf. note, p. 167 below), was abandoned.
gpt
Blougram's splendid and genial duplicity already attracted him, but the analysis of the meretricious figure of Napoleon became a congenial problem only to that later Browning of the 'Sixties and 'Seventies who was to explore the shady souls of a Guido, a Miranda, and a Sludge. On the other hand, deeply as he felt the sorrows of Italy, it was no part of his poetic mission to sing them. The voice of a great community wakened no lyric note in him, nor did his anger on its behalf break into dithyrambs. Nationality was not an effectual motive with him. He felt as keenly as his wife, or as Shelley; but his feeling broke out in fitful allusion or sardonic jest in the _De Gustibus_ or the _Old Pictures_--not in a _Casa Guidi Windows_, or _Songs before Congress_, an _Ode to Naples_, or a _Hellas_. An
human
Ode containing, by his own account, fierce things about England, he destroyed after Villafranca. It is only in subtle and original variations that we faintly recognise the broad simple theme of Italy's struggle for deliverance. The _Patriot_ and _Instans Tyrannus_ both have a kind of nexus with the place and time; but the one is a caustic satire on popular fickleness and the other a sardonically humorous travesty of persecution. Italy is mentioned in neither. Both are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the national struggle which thrills us in _The Italian in England_ and the third scene of _Pippa Passes_. This