Browning may be said to have carried to its flood tide the "Liberal Movement in English Literature," as Courthope calls it, inaugurated at the dawn of the century by the Lake School, which reacted against the correct school of Dryden and Pope. Along with the earlier poets of the century he shared lack of appreciation at the hands of critics in general. The critics had been bred in the school of the eighteenth century, and naturally would be incapable of understanding a man whose thought was permeated with the doctrines of evolution, then an unknown quantity except to the elect in scientific circles, and not to become the possession of the thinking world at large until beyond the middle of the century; whose soul was full of the ardor of democracy, shown not only in his choice and treatment of subjects, but in his reckless independence of all the shibboleths of the past; and whose liberalness in the treatment of moral and religious problems was such as to scandalize many in an age when the law forbade that a man should marry his deceased wife's sister, and when the Higher Criticism of the Bible had not yet migrated to England from Germany; and, finally, whose style was everything that was atrocious because entirely different from anything they had seen before. The century had to grow up to him. It is needless to say that it did so. Just as out of the turmoil of conflicting scientific and religious thought has emerged a serene belief in man's spiritual destiny, so out of the turmoil of conflicting schools of criticism has arisen a perception of the value of the new, the original, the different in art. Critics begin to apply the principles of evolution to their criticism as Browning applied it to his art, with the result that they no longer measure by past standards of art but by relating the art to the life of the time in its various manifestations, not forgetting that the poet or the dramatist may have a further vision of what is to come than any other man of his age. The people first, for the most part, found out that here in Browning's work was a new force, and calmly formed themselves into groups to study what manner of force it might be, regardless of the sneers of newspaperdom and conventional academies. And gradually to the few appreciative critics of the early days have been added one authoritative voice after another until the chorus of praise has become a large one, and Browning, though later than any great poet of the century, is coming into his own.