With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter.

But almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he had really read he enjoyed.

He stands pre-eminent among those great universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended existence like any other material, in its samples.

He had no kinship with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have lived under, and all the ties they have known.

He thought the world good because he had found so many things that were good in it--religion, the nation, the family, the social class.