An occasional allusion or poem like this makes us aware from time to time of Browning's constant sympathy with any movement which meant good to the masses. Even if he had not written near the end of his life "Why I am a Liberal," there could be no doubt in any one's mind of his political ideals. In "The Lost Leader" is perhaps his strongest utterance upon the subject. The fact that it was called out by Wordsworth's lapse into conservatism after the horrors of the French Revolution had brought him and his _sans culotte_ brethren, Southey and Coleridge, to pause, a fact very possibly freshened in Browning's mind by Wordsworth's receiving a pension in 1842 and the poet-laureateship in 1843, does not affect the force of the poem as a personal utterance on the side of democracy. Browning, himself, considered the poem far too fierce as a portrayal of Wordsworth's case.[2] He evidently forgot Wordsworth, and thought only of a renegade liberal as he went on with the poem. It was written the same year that there occurred the last attempt to postpone the passing of the Anti-Corn Law Bill, when the intensity of feeling on the part of all who believed in progress was at its height, and the bare thought of a deserter from Liberal ranks would be enough to exasperate any man who had the nation's welfare at heart. That Browning's feeling at the time reached the point not only of exasperation but of utmost scorn for any one who was not on the liberal side is shown most forcibly in the bitter lines: "Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, One more devil's triumph and sorrow for angels, One more wrong to man, one more insult to God!" Browning speaks of having thought of Wordsworth at an unlucky juncture. Whatever the exact episode which called forth the poem may have been, we are safe in saying that at a time when Disraeli was attacking Sir Robert Peel because of his honesty in avowing his conversion to free trade, and because of his bravery in coming out from his party, in breaking up his cabinet and regardless of all costs in determining to carry the bill or resign, and finally carrying it in the face of the greatest odds--at such a time, when a great conservative leader had shown himself capable of being won over to a great liberal principle; the spectacle of a deserter from the cause, and that deserter a member of one's own brotherhood of poets, would be especially hard to bear. One feels a little like asking why did not Browning let his enthusiasm carry him for once into a contemporary expression of admiration for Sir Robert Peel? Perhaps the tortuous windings of parliamentary proceedings obscured to a near view the true greatness of Peel's action.