A very great part of the difficulty of _Sordello_, for instance, is in the fact that before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human epochs--the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in mediaeval Italy.

Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that impetuous humility which we have previously observed.

His father was a student of mediaeval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket.

Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it talks English to an Italian organ grinder.

Beyond this the poem of _Sordello_, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented by _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_.