Just as an agreement between the dramatist and the audience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between the painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so an agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great figures of morality--the hero, the saint, the average man, the gentleman.

Browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a real pleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions.

He delighted, with a true poetic delight, in being conventional.

Being by birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an Englishman; being by rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancient scruples and its everlasting boundaries.

He was everything that he was with a definite and conscious pleasure--a man, a Liberal, an Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man.
This must always be remembered as a general characteristic of Browning, this ardent and headlong conventionality.