Browning had watched Louis Napoleon's career with mixed feelings; he had resented the _coup d'etat_, and still more the annexation of Savoy and Nice after the war of 1859.

But he had never shared the bitter animus which prevailed at home.

He was equally far, no doubt, from sharing the exalted hero-worship which inspired his wife's _Poems before Congress_.

The creator of _The Italian in England_, of Luigi, and Bluphocks, could not but recognise the signal services of Napoleon to the cause of Italian freedom, however sharply he condemned the hard terms on which Italy had been compelled to purchase it.

"It was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence for it--which is a pity";[57] it was on the lines of this epigram, already quoted, that eleven years later he still interpreted the fallen emperor, and that he now completed, as it would seem, the abandoned poem of 1860.