Browning, as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism.

But as he worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the man's skin and testify to the man's ideals.

However this may be, it is worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in connection with one of the most famous of these monologues.
When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with the spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that he gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied in "Mr.Sludge the Medium." The statement so often made, particularly in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has suffered more than Browning despite his students and societies.

The man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr.Hiram H.
Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more than once suggested, something of a fool.

Nor is there the smallest reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any particular resemblance to Home considered as an individual.