It is hardly rash to connect with his admiration for the elder artist Browning's predilection for these brief revealing glimpses into the past.

Browning cared less for the actual _personnel_ of history, and often imagined his speakers as well as their talk; but he imagined them with an equal instinct for seizing the expressive traits of nationalities and of times, and a similar, if more spontaneous and naive, anti-feudal temper.

The French camp and the Spanish cloister, _Gismond_ and _My Last Duchess_ (originally called _France_ and _Italy_), are penetrated with the spirit of peoples, ages, and institutions as seized by a historical student of brilliant imagination and pronounced antipathies.
But in one point Landor and Browning stood at opposite poles.

Landor, far beyond any contemporary English example, had the classic sense and mastery of style; Browning's individuality of manner rested on a robust indifference to all the traditional conventions of poetic speech.

The wave of realism which swept over English letters in the early 'Forties broke down many barriers of language; the new things that had to be said demanded new ways of saying them; homely, grotesque, or sordid life was rendered in sordid, grotesque, and homely terms.