Therefore from age to age in history arise these great despotic dreamers, whether they be Royalists or Imperialists or even Socialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enter into rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right of going its own way.

When a man begins to think that the grass will not grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor.

Of these men Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great public demand.

Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the friend of another man.

But the whole question is interesting, because Browning, although he never again attacked a political drama of such palpable importance as _Strafford_, could never keep politics altogether out of his dramatic work.