Browning, whose visionary idealism went along with so unaffected a
relish for the world and the talents which succeed there. A great
spiritual ruler, performing with congenial ease the enormous and varied
functions of his office, and with intellectual resources, when they were
discharged, to win distinction in scholarship, at chess, in society,
appealed powerfully to Browning's congenital delight in all strong and
vivid life. He was a great athlete, who had completely mastered his
circumstances and shaped his life to his will. Opposed to a man of this
varied and brilliant achievement, an ineffectual dilettante appeared a
sorry creature enough; and Browning, far from taking his part and
putting in his craven mouth the burning retorts which the reader in vain
expects, makes him play helplessly with olive-stones while the great
bishop rolls him out his mind, and then, as one cured and confuted,
betake himself to the life of humbler practical activity and social
service.

It is plain that the actual Blougram offered tempting points of contact
with that strenuous ideal of life which he was later to preach through
the lips of "Rabbi ben Ezra." Even what was most problematic in him, his
apparently sincere profession of an outworn creed, suggested the
difficult feat of a gymnast balancing on a narrow edge, or forcibly
holding his unbelief in check,--

"Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe."

But Browning marks clearly the element both of self-deception and
deliberate masquerade in Blougram's defence. He made him "say right
things and call them by wrong names." The intellectual athlete in him
went out to the intellectual athlete in the other, and rejoiced in