We realise Garibaldi as a sudden and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that Napoleon was the master of Europe.

Similarly, we think of Browning as the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on Mr.Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr.Shelley's Atheistic Poem," and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for some one who could tell him who Mr.Shelley was.

Browning was, in short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution.
The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing.

It may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by its nature, destructive.

The great dominant idea of the whole of that period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping him out of that Eden.