Their large and catholic humanity exempted them from much that makes for bold and sensational outline in the story of a career.

Their poetic home was built upon all the philistine virtues.

Mrs Jameson laughed at their "miraculous prudence and economy"; and Mrs Browning herself laughed, a little, at her husband's punctilious rigour in paying his debts,--his "horror of owing five shillings for five days"; Browning, a born virtuoso in whatever he undertook, abhorring a neglected bill as he did an easy rhyme, and all other symbols of that slovenly Bohemia which came nearest, on the whole, to his conception of absolute evil.

They lived at first in much seclusion, seeking no society, and unknown alike to the Italian and the English quarters of the Florentine world.

But Arcady was, at bottom, just as foreign to their ways as Bohemia.