Evidently a noble creature in all things." In June, 1850, he had met Robert Browning, on the invitation of Coventry Patmore, and said: "He is the only person whom I have ever heard talk ration-ally about the Italians, though on the Liberal side." In these volumes of "Modern Painters" he had to discuss the Mediaeval and Renaissance spirit in its relation to art, and to illustrate from Browning's poetry, "unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages, always vital and right and profound; so that in the matter of art there is hardly a principle connected with the mediaeval temper that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his." This was written twenty-five years before the Browning Society was heard of, and at a time when the style of Browning was an offence to most people.

To Ruskin, also, it had been some, thing of a puzzle; and he wrote to the poet, asking him to explain himself; which the poet accordingly did.
That Ruskin was open to conviction and conversion could be shown from the difference in his tone of thought about poetry before and after this period; that he was the best of friends with the man who took him to task for narrowness, may be seen from the following letter, written on the next Christmas Eve: "MY DEAR MR.

RUSKIN, "Your note having just arrived, Robert deputes me to write for him while he dresses to go out on an engagement.

It is the evening.

All the hours are wasted, since the morning, through our not being found at the Rue de Grenelle, but here--and our instinct of self-preservation or self-satisfaction insists on our not losing a moment more by our own fault.
"Thank you, thank you for sending us your book, and also for writing my husband's name in it.