"'How long, O Lord, how long!' Robert kept saying." 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'etat_, 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: "It was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence for it, which is a pity." A dozen years later Louis Napoleon's equivocal character and career were to be subjected by Browning to a still more equivocal exposition.

But this sordid trait brought him within a category of "soul" 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.