Napoleon the _coup d'état_, and when the liberation of Lombardy was
followed by the annexation of Savoy and Nice, the Emperor's devoted
defender had to listen, without the power of effective retort, to his
biting summary of the situation: "It was a great action; but he has
taken eighteenpence for it, which is a pity."

A dozen years later Louis Napoleon's equivocal character and career were
to be subjected by Browning to a still more equivocal exposition. But
this sordid trait brought him within a category of "soul" upon which
Browning did not yet, in these glowing years, readily lavish his art. A
poem upon Napoleon, which had occupied him much during the winter of
1859 (cf. note, p. 167 below), was abandoned. "Blougram's" splendid and
genial duplicity already attracted him, but the analysis of the
meretricious figure of Napoleon became a congenial problem only to that
later Browning of the 'Sixties and 'Seventies who was to explore the
shady souls of a Guido, a Miranda, and a Sludge. On the other hand,
deeply as he felt the sorrows of Italy, it was no part of his poetic
mission to sing them. The voice of a great community wakened no lyric
note in him, nor did his anger on its behalf break into dithyrambs.
Nationality was not an effectual motive with him. He felt as keenly as
his wife, or as Shelley; but his feeling broke out in fitful allusion or
sardonic jest in the _De Gustibus_ or the _Old Pictures_--not in a _Casa
Guidi Windows_, or _Songs before Congress_, an _Ode to Naples_, or a
_Hellas_. An "Ode" containing, by his own account, fierce things about
England, he destroyed after Villafranca. It is only in subtle and
original variations that we faintly recognise the broad simple theme of
Italy's struggle for deliverance. The _Patriot_ and _Instans Tyrannus_
both have a kind of nexus with the place and time; but the one is a
caustic satire on popular fickleness and the other a sardonically
humorous travesty of persecution. Italy is mentioned in neither. Both