From his idealised Admetos Browning passed with hardly a pause to
attempt the more difficult feat of idealising a living sovereign.
Admetos was ennobled by presenting him as a political idealist; the
French Emperor, whose career had closed at Sedan, was in some degree
qualified for a parallel operation by the obscurity which still invested
the inmost nature of that well-meaning adventurer. Browning had watched
Louis Napoleon's career with mixed feelings; he had resented the _coup
d'état_, 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. He saw in him a man of generous impulses doubled
with a _borné_ politician, a ruler of genuine Liberal and even
democratic proclivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate
opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of Liberalism. The
shifting standpoints of such a man are reproduced with superfluous
fidelity in his supposed Defence, which seems designed to be as elusive
and impalpable as the character it reflects. How unlike the brilliant
and precise realism of Blougram, sixteen years before! The upcurling
cloud-rings from Hohenstiel's cigar seem to symbolise something
unsubstantial and evasive in the whole fabric. The assumptions we are
invited to form give way one after another. Leicester Square proves the