But all this vigorous and very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth Barrett.

She declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry.
Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error which every man would desire to have made.
One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is the fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife.

"If he is vain of anything," writes Mrs.Browning, "it is of my restored health." Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness, "and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature." When a lady in Italy said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a Christian to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile degree.

But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities.
Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated.
Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly conceited of their defects.
One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the Brownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor.

Browning found him living with some of his wife's relations, and engaged in a continuous and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings.
He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and stately but almost extinct blend--the aristocratic republican.