The life of Robert Browning, with notices of his writings, his family, & his friends

Preface

NO apology is expected from the author of a work of imagination, but a biographer must show cause why he has undertaken his task. Unhappily, in the present case, this duty cannot be carried out by him with whom the design originated. Professor Hall Griffin had amassed much material for a biography of Robert Browning, whose career and writings had been for many years a principal subject of his thought and study. He had been at great pains to identify the sites of his early homes in South London ; thence he had followed him to Asolo and to Florence, and had gone on pilgrimage to the various cities and regions of Italy which were visited by the poet and his wife during their summer wanderings, or were the scene of their winter sojourns. Nor had he neglected spots which were closely connected with his later years ; La Saisiaz, for instance, and, above all, Venice. He had enjoyed the friendship of Browning's son and sister, who gave him ungrudging help; Miss Browning's wonderful memory, in particular, throwing light upon many obscure points in her brother's early history ; while he had made, with Mr. Barrett Browning's sanction, an extensive examination of the books in the Palazzo Rezzonico, those " wisest, ancient books," amid which the future poet passed his childhood. The recollections of surviving friends had been also put at his disposal ; those, for example, of the late Sir Theodore Martin and of Mr. W. C. Cartwright, of Aynhoe, who was on terms of close intimacy with Browning in Florence and in Rome. At last he was ready to begin ; and rather more than half his projected work was written, when an acute attack of illness obliged him to lay aside his pen, as it proved for ever.

vi THE LIFE OF ROBERT BROWNING

Should this mass of material and this partial achievement be left to gather dust, unseen and useless? Or should another hand, following the author's design as closely as might be practicable, seek to complete the unfinished fabric ? These were questions which Professor Griffin's executor was presently called upon to decide. After consultation with those acquainted with his plans, especially with Professor Churton Collins, whose loss also we have since had to deplore, the verdict was that the attempt, though difficult, should at least be made. The present volume is the result of that decision.

As Professor Griffin's collaborator (if the term may pass) read through the manuscript and notes entrusted to him the author's purpose became apparent. Something more complete and more exact than what his predecessors had achieved was evidently intended. Without the least desire to depreciate the interest of earlier Lives, certain errors — errors both of fact and of inference — were to be rectified. For the attainment of this end new material was available, to which Mrs. Orr, for example — whose work must always possess a peculiar attraction, inasmuch as she had the advantage of a close friendship with Browning — had not access ; chiefly the Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, the four volumes of the poet's letters privately printed by Mr. Wise, and Alfred Domett's unpublished diary, of which last Professor Griffin was practically the discoverer. Again, as to the poems, no systematic interpretation of them was contemplated, such as is included in Professor Dowden's Robert Browning, nor any detailed criticism ; but, on the other hand, everything that could be discovered as to their origins, their growth and their reception by the public was to be included. Such was the impression which the manuscript conveyed, and it is on these lines that the task of completion has been attempted. In the result, what is now offered is not a study of the life of Robert Browning seen through a temperament, but a record based upon a sympathetic review and interpretation of accepted facts.

In the forefront of works which have been consulted, or from which brief citations have been made, are to be placed

PREFACE vH

the Life aftd Letters of Robert Browning, by Mrs. Sutherland Orr, and her Handbook ; and the biographical studies of the poet by the late Mr. W. Sharp and by Professor Dowden. To these must be added T. A. Trollope's What I Remember ; Miss Frances Power Cobbe's autobiography and her Italics ; Macready's Reminiscences; Forster's Life of Dickens and his Walter Savage Landor, a Biography ; Ruskin's Modern Painters ; Gavan Duffy's Conversations with Carlyle and My Life in Two Hemispheres ; Miss Martineau's Autobiography; Mrs. Andrew Crosse's Red Letter Days ; Fanny Kemble's Ftirther Records ; Dr. Moncure Conway's Memorials of South Place ; Nathaniel Hawthorne's Notebooks ; Sir T. Wemyss Reid's Life of Lord Hotighton ; Margaret Fuller's Memoirs ; The Life and Letters of Sir f. E. Millais ; Connop Thirl wall's Letters to a Friend ; the Abbe J. Dominique's Le poHe Robert Browning d Ste. Marie de Portiic; and several more. Some valuable information has been gleaned from periodicals, particularly from Mrs. Bronson's papers, Browning in Venice {Cornhill ^.nd Century, Feb. 1902) and Browning in Asolo {Century, 1900) ; those by Kate Field on Mrs. Browning and on The Last Days of Walter Savage Landor {Atlantic Monthly, September, 1861 and April, 1866) ; Miss Masson's Robert Browning in Edinburgh {Cornhill, February, 1909, by kind permission of Editor and Author) ; Th. Bentzon's A French Friend of Broivning {Scribner, July, 1896) ; and Mr. Edmund Gosse's Swinburne: Personal Recollections {Fortnightly Review, June, 1909).

It is my duty and pleasure as collaborator to thank those who by conversation or letter have helped me to form a clearer conception of Browning's character and bearing ; especially Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Colvin, and Mrs. R. Courtenay Bell ; Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Lord Tennyson, the Master of Balliol, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Sidgwick, Mr. A. L. Smith, Mr. R. C. Lehmann, Mr. Comyns Carr, and Mr. Percy Fitzgerald. I am also indebted to several of the above for leave to derive information from their published works; from Mr. Gosse's Robert Browning: Personalia and his article Robert Browning in the Supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography ; from Mr.

viii THE LIFE OF ROBERT BROWNING

Rossetti's Some Reminiscences and Rtiskin, Rossetti, Preraphaelitism ; from Mr. Lehmann's Memories of Half a Century ; from Mr. Comyns Carr's Some Eminent Victorians ; from Mr. Percy Fitzgerald's y^o/m Forster ; and from Tennyson : a Memoir. I also desire to express my acknowledgment of permission to make use of some passages in Mr. Henry James's William Wetmore Story and his Friends, Lady Ritchie's Records of Temiyson, Ruskin and tJie BrowningSy and Mr. Marcus B. Huish's Happy England. My thanks are due to Messrs. F. Warne and Co. for leave to cite a passage from a preface by Mrs. Ogilvy, prefixed to their edition of Mrs. Browning's poems ; to Balliol College for a similar sanction in the case of The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett ; to the late Dr. F. J. Furnivall for the loan of an annotated copy of his Browni7ig Bibliography and for some valuable suggestions ; to Mr. Thomas J. Wise for access granted to Browning's privately printed Letters, and to the publications of the Browning Society ; and to Mr. Alfred Nelson Domett, who put his father's diary and two portraits at Professor Griffin's disposal. Above all, Mr. Barrett Browning is to be thanked, both for his assent to the scheme and for his permission, granted in conjunction with his representatives, Messrs. Smith and Elder, to utilize copyright matter, whether in the shape of letters or poems. If any other acknowledgment remain unpaid, the omission is inadvertent, and may, I trust, be pardoned.

In conclusion, I have to tender my sincere thanks to Mrs. Hall Griffin for entrusting me with a delicate and honourable task, of whose responsibilities I have been fully sensible, and to express the hope that she and Professor Griffin's friends, as well as readers of this book in general, may not be wholly dissatisfied with the result.

H. C. M.

Contents

CHAP. F&GB

PREFACE V

I, PARENTAGE AND EARLY HOME INFLUENCES ... I

Appendix

INDEX 329

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Robert Browning, 1889 Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

Southampton Street, Camberwell, 1898 . . . .28

From a Drawing by E. HULL

Robert Browning, 1835 l^

From an Engraving by J. C. Armytage

Alfred Domett, 1836 82

From a Drawing by Lance

ASOLO 96

Elizabeth Barrett Browning when a Girl .... 144

Sketched by her sister, Arabella Barrett

Casa Guidi, from the Pitti Palace 162

Miss Blagden's Villa AT Bellosguardo 164-

Casa Guidi and Felice Church 165

Photograph by W. HALL Griffin "The Guardian Angel" i66

By GuERCiNO (S. Agostino, Fano)

Caricatures drawn by Robert Browning, Senior, Father

OF THE Poet 187 v xii THE LIFE OF ROBERT BROWNING

FACING PAGE

Caricature drawn by Robert Browning, Senior, Father OF THE Poet i88

Statue of Duke Ferdinand, Annunziata Piazza, Florence 198 Photograph by W. Hall Griffin

Portraits of Andrea del Sarto and Lucrezia Fede, his Wife 200

From the Painting in the Pitti Palace. Photograph by Alinari

The Coronation of the Virgin 202

From the Painting by Fra Lippo Lippi in the Belle Arti, Florence

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1858 212

From an Engraving after a Photograph by Macaire

BETWEEN PAGES

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1859 .... 216-217

From the Drawing by Field Talfourd in the National Portrait Gallery

From the Drawing by Field Talfourd in the National Portrait Gallery

FACING PAGE

Paddington Canal, as seen from Browning's House in

Warwick Crescent 226

Photograph by A, RISCHGITZ

MS. OF "The Ring and the Book" 228

Piazza of San Lorenzo, Florence, where the "Square

Old Yellow Book" was Bought 230

Photograph by Alinari

From the Painting by G. F. Watts, R.A. Photograph by Frederick Hollyer

The San Clemente Gate, Arezzo 240

Alfred Domett, 1871 248

From a Photograph

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii

FACING PAGE

Photograph by Bassano

The Chalet of la Saisiaz 263

La Saleve, overlooking the Arve and Rhone Valley . 264

Entrance Gate, Asolo 268 1.

From a Photograph by Fradelle & Young

MS. OF "Wanting is What?" 272

Mrs. Arthur Bronson, 1890 274

From a Painting

From the Painting by RUDOLPH Lehmann in the National Portrait Gallery

Grand Canal and Palazzo Rezzonico 278

Photograph by Fradelle & Young

Main Street of Asolo 280

Mrs. Bronson's Loggia, Asolo 281

Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice 282

Chapter I Parentage And Early Home Influences

Robert Browning's inheritance from his grandfather — His father's early manhood in the West Indies, return to England, mode of life and marriage — His mother's parentage — His grandfather and father reconciled — His favourite uncle, Reuben — Reuben's gifts to him — -Reuben's estimate of his half-brother, the poet's father — Influence of Browning's home upon his mental growth — Early reading in his father's library — His love of pictures — Gerard de Lairesse and the Dulwich Gallery — His love of music — " The Bandsman Avison " — ^His masters, Abel and John Relfe — His taste for out-of-the-way learning— Bernard de Mandeville and "putting a case "^ — His acquaintance with Daniel Bartoli's Simboli — His debt to Wanley's Wonders of the Little World, and to the Biographie Universelle.

o

N the fly-leaf of a large, old-fashioned, illustrated family Bible there stands written in a bold, clear hand : —

" Robert Browning married to Sarah Anna Wiedemann at Camberwell Feb 19 181 1.

Robert Browning born 7th May 181 2.

Sarah Anna Browning born 7th Jan 18 14."

The handwriting is that of the poet's father, and these

names are those of the four who composed the household at

Southampton Street, Camberwell, where, wrote one who

knew them welV " father, mother, only son, and only

' Alfred Domett.

B daughter, formed a most united, harmonious, and intellectual family."

Browning has recorded two facts connected with his own birth ; that he was born with light yellow hair, and that he was born " supremely passionate." As, according to the same authority, his father was "tender-hearted to a fault," and as his mother was equally gentle, we must doubtless look to his grandfather, the first really recognizable figure in the family history, for the origin of this passionate element in the poet's nature. Robert Browning, the grandfather, was a handsome, vigorous, capable business man, first a clerk, and subsequently ihead of a department in the Bank of England. Evidences of his possession of a hasty and irascible temper are to be found in his dealings with his eldest son, Robert, who was to become, in course of time, the poet's father.

He was twice married, first to Margaret Tittle, a West Indian lady. They settled at Battersea, then a quiet river-side village, where, in 1782, their eldest son was born. Two years later the little family moved to Camberwell, then also a village, whose square embattled church tower was visible across the fields from Battersea, as it was from the river bridges and the cross roads of the Strand. It stood at the base of the pretty, tree-clad slopes of Denmark Hill, Heme Hill, and Champion Hill, amid hedgerows and oak trees, surrounded by well-stocked pastures and their overshadowing willows, amid flowers and fruit trees, which were the haunt of the butterfly. Was not the " Camberwell Beauty " famous ? Indeed, when the Browning household moved to Camberwell the parish authorities had just been busy " apprehending " the too numerous caterpillars, and in a single season had secured some four hundred bushels ! A generation later, in 1 8 10, Dame Priscilla Wakefield^ in her Perambulations described Camberwell as " a pleasant retreat for those who have a taste for the country, while their avocations still call them daily to London, as it is only three miles from that city ; " and as Margaret Tittle's husband was a clerk in the Bank, Dame Priscilla's description may well apply to him.

• Grandmother of the famous colonizer of New Zealand, Edmund Gibbon Wakefield.

HIS FATHER'S YOUTH 3

Two other children ^ were born at Camberwell, and five years after the removal from Battersea, in the spring of the year in which the Bastille fell, MargaretTittle was laid to rest beside her youngest boy in the churchyard of the old parish church of St. Giles, not far from the village green, famous then and for more than fifty years afterwards for its boisterous annual Fair. Her sole surviving son, Robert, was but a child of seven, too young to appreciate the stirring events then taking place in the French capital where he was to pass the closing years of his life, and too young to take interest in the resolutions just submitted by Wilberforce to Parliament for the abolition of the slave trade. But some thirteen years later, when he found himself among the slaves at St. Kitt's, in a lucrative position on his late mother's sugar plantation, " he conceived such a hatred of the slave system . . . that he relinquished every prospect — supported himself, while there, in some other capacity, and came back while yet a boy, to his father's profound astonishment and rage." He had actually tried to teach a negro to read ! His father was no longer a widower ; five years after his first wife's death, when his son was twelve and he a man of forty-five, he had married a bride of twenty-three. Margaret Tittle's portrait was promptly relegated to the garret, and Margaret Tittle's son was before long allotted a definite career on his mother's West Indian estate. The " profound astonishment and rage " of the passionate man of fifty-three at his son's return are not inexplicable. Parson Adams, we are told, was " a little encumbered with a wife and six children ; " Mr. Browning's second marriage involved provision for nine. It is true that the "handsome income of twenty-three pounds a year" assigned by Fielding to the good parson did not represent that of the poet's grandfather ; but a salary of less than ^500 a year is perhaps not so ample a provision for thirteen people as to lead a practical man to look with complacency upon the renunciation by his eldest son of a lucrative position, for conscientious scruples which he evidently did not share. He doubtless regarded this act very much as Sir Timothy Shelley regarded some of the acts of his incomprehensible

' Margaret Morris, died unmarried in 1857, and William, died 1784, in infancy.

son. " My father," wrote Browning in regard to this matter, "on his return, had the intention of devoting himself to art, for which he had many qualifications and abundant love ; but the quarrel with his father, who married again and continued to hate him till a few years before his death, induced him to go at once and consume his life after a fashion he always detested." ^ This fashion was to follow in the paternal footsteps by becoming a clerk in the Bank of England. He took the decisive step in November, 1803, four months after attaining his majority. Nearly fifty years later Browning's father doubtless welcomed his release as heartily as Charles Lamb welcomed his, when he quitted his desk in Leadenhall Street some thirty years before'. " Here am I," wrote Lamb to Wordsworth in 1825, "after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o'clock, this finest of April mornings, a freed man, with ;^44i a year for the remainder of my life." The " slavery " of the poet's father had lasted seventeen years longer than that of Lamb, but his retiring pension amounted to not quite half that assigned to the author of Elia by the directors of the East India Company.

Sarah Anna Wiedemann, the poet's mother, who was of German parentage, though born in Scotland, had in her girlhood also lived at Camberwell, where she and her sister Christiana had their residence with an uncle. Christiana, whose eldest son James became one of Browning's early intimates, was the aunt who generously paid for the publication of Pauline in 1833. She had married a well-to-do local brewer, Mr. John Silverthorne, and when Browning's grandfather, eight years after the West Indian crisis, heard that his eldest son was a suitor for the remaining Miss Wiedemann, " he benevolently waited upon her uncle," wrote the poet to Miss Barrett in 1846, "to assure him that his niece would be thrown away on a man so evidently born to be hanged ! — these were his words." Their very violence, in all probability, militated against the effect they were intended to produce. The marriage took place, although without his sanction.

Passionate and self-willed as he was, Robert Browning's grandfather seems to have been of a far more placable nature

* Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, vol. ii. p. 477.

HIS IRASCIBLE GRANDFATHER 5

than his future father-in-law, Mr. Barrett, who never forgave the marriage of his eldest daughter Elizabeth, of his second daughter Henrietta, or of his son Alfred, Son or daughter, the offence was the same ; mention of them must never again be made in his presence, and their names were at once struck from his will. But, in 1819, two years before Robert Browning, the grandfather, retired from the Bank on a pension of ;^ 421 a year, he made his will, and in it he wrote : —

" As my son Robert Browning and daughter Margaret Morris Browning have had by their Uncle Tittle and Aunt Mill a much greater proportion than can be left to my [nine] other dear children, I trust they will not think I am deficient in love and regard to them : I give to my said dear children Robert and Margaret Morris Browning, ten pounds each for a ring. I give to my dear wife Jane Browning, all the rest I shall die possessed of, trusting in her love and prudence she will to the best in her power, take care of our dear children." ^

As the irascible grandparent lived to see the publication of Paulme in 1833,^ it would seem that the duration of the quarrel has been somewhat exaggerated, and that friendly intercourse may probably be regarded as having been resumed by the date of the not unkindly worded will, when the poet was a child of seven. Collateral evidence is found in the family tradition that the old man stood in dread of the proximity of his lively grandchild to his gouty foot. However this may be, it is certain that, after his death at the age of eighty-four, his widow, who was but eleven years older than her stepson, the poet's father, moved from Islington, where her husband had died, and settled once more on the south side of the river, just beyond the toll-bar at New Cross, in one of the five houses of Albert Terrace, about a hundred yards from the farmhouse cottage in which her stepson and his family came to dwell in December, 1840. It is also certain that cordial relations existed between the two households. Margaret Tittle's portrait had ere this emerged from the garret, and was

' Browning Soc. Papers, Iviii., Robert Brcnuning's Ancestors, by Dr. F. J. Furnivall, p. 14.

* Pauline appeared in March, 1S33 > ^^^ grandfather died in September.

hanging in her son's dining-roon:i. At New Cross the widow's second son, Reuben, the poet's favourite uncle and but nine years his senior, stabled his horse at " The Cottage," as there was no stable at Albert Terrace on the opposite side of the high-road ; and the poet, a skilful rider from boyhood, had free use of the horse, a gallop upon whose back inspired the anapaestic lines. As I ride, as I ride, in which he commemorates the Arab chieftain, Abd el Kadr. But there are clear indications of pleasant intercourse even during the lifetime of the Irascible, one of which has a special suggestiveness. Reuben Browning, an excellent classical scholar, evidently took an early and kindly interest in the studies of his nephew, for on the flyleaf of a translation of Horace — whose Odes Browning's father is said to have known by heart — is written in Reuben's clear handwriting, " Robert Browning, July, 1824, the gift of his Uncle, Reuben Browning." This gift to the boy of twelve, who was then writing his first volume of Byronic verse, was to bear unexpected fruit ; for the translation was that of Christopher Smart, whose sad life-story Browning doubtless soon learnt from his bookloving father, and with whose Song to David he was not long in becoming familiar. Sixty-three years later. Smart, "who translated Horace," was hailed by the poet of seventy-five, in his Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, as one who had sung

" A song where flute-breath silvers trumpet-clang, And stations you for once on either hand With Milton and with Keats."

Of Smart's long-neglected poem, termed by Rossetti " a masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources and reverberant sound," Browning became the great champion. In later days he loved to recite its fervid stanzas to his friends, and in earlier days it was not without influence upon the evolution of his own noble Saul ; but ten years before the date of Satil the sad fate of the author of the Song to David — Smart's only real poem — which was composed in Bedlam, had inspired some of the most striking lines in Paracelsus (1835) : —

CHRISTOPHER SMART 7

" One man shall crawl Through life surrounded with all stirring things, Unmoved ; and he goes mad : and from the wreck Of what he was, by his wild talk alone, You first collect how great a spirit he hid." ^

One other gift from his Uncle Reuben is worth mention. Its date is six years later than that of the Horace, but still three years before the death of the grandfather. It was not a translation this time, but an original ; an exquisite edition of the Encheiridion of Epictetus, printed by the scholarly and unfortunate Robert Foulis, whom Gray ranked with the Etiennes and Elzevirs, and of whose Hojuer Gibbon declared that it made even that " poet's sense appear more beautiful and transparent." Gray and Gibbon, moreover, were speaking of the ordinary editions of the Glasgow printer : every page of Browning's EncJieiridion was a page of pure white silk.

Robert Browning, the grandfather, is said to have mainly confined his reading to the Bible and Tom yones, but he certainly gave all three of his sons an excellent education. The poet's father " was a scholar and knew Greek " as well as Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew. The exact Latin scholarship of Reuben Browning drew words of praise from the lips of Lord Beaconsfield ; ^ and William Shergold Browning, the eldest son by the second marriage, contributed essays to the Gentleman's Magazine, and wrote, as well as some forgotten historical novels, a very acceptable History of the Hugiie^iots. The practical father, who had placed his firstborn in the Bank of England, secured for the two younger sons positions with Messrs. Rothschild ; Reuben was in the London office, and William Shergold — of whom the households at New Cross, therefore, saw but little — was in Paris from 1824 till October, 1845. Reuben was twenty-one years younger than his half-brother Robert, the poet's father, of whom he said that "one could not know him without being

' " Depend upon it," he wrote in 1887, *' no goody-goody writer ever conceived or executed the stanzas I could repeat — as I did, with all the effect I supposed would follow — to people of authority enough : Tennyson, the present Piishop of London, and, last year, to Wendell Holmes, who had asked me innocently at Oxford ' whether I knew the wonderful poem,'"

2 See Mrs. Orr's Life, p. 81, inspired with regard and admiration." He cordially admired his "extraordinary talents, profound intelligence, and preeminent good nature, his facetious epigrams, and fugitive poems" — the words are his own — and regretted that, owing to a most unassuming, reticent, and retiring nature, " of all his acquaintance few were cognisant of his intrinsic worth." Reuben placed on record his impressions, and this is his description : —

" His wonderful store of information might really be compared to an inexhaustible mine. It comprised not merely a thorough scholastic outline of the world, but the critical points of ancient and modern history, the lore of the Middle Ages, all political combinations of parties, their description and consequences ; and especially the lives of the poets and painters, concerning whom he ever had to communicate some interesting anecdote not generally known. In short, he was a living encyclopaedia. The love of reading attracted him by sympathy to books ; old books were his delight, and by his continual search after them he not only knew all the old bookstalls in London, but their contents, and if any scarce work were spoken of, he could tell forthwith where a copy of it could be had. Nay, he would even describe in what part of the shop it was placed, and the price likely to be asked for it. Thus his own library became his treasure. His books, however, were confessedly not remarkable for costly binding, but for their rarity or for interesting remarks he had to make on most of them ; and his memory was so good that not infrequently, when a conversation at his table had reference to any particular subject, has he quietly left the room and in the dark, from a thousand volumes in his library, brought two or three illustrations of the point under discussion." ^

The well-knit, rather undersized, blue-eyed, bright-complexioned book-lover, who had " the scent of a hound and the snap of a bull-dog" for an old or rare volume, eagerly visiting the bookstalls of London or, in later days, those on the Quais of Paris, recalls the tall, quick-eyed, rapid-striding Southey bent on similar quests ; and the home at Southampton Street resembled Greta Hall in that it was literally overflowing with books. " Why, Montesinos," remarks

' Introductory notes by Reuben Browning, prefixed to a small volume of sketches by Robert Browning, senior. The sale of this work in an auction room is recorded in the Art yotunal, 1S96, p. 55.

IN HIS FATHER'S LIBRARY 9

Southey, at the beginning of his Colloquy on the Library, " with these books, and the deh'ght you take in their constant society, what have you to covet or desire ? " " Nothing," was the reply — " except more books."

Such a book-lover, then, was the poet's father ; and rightly to understand the poet's own development it is absolutely essential to understand his home, for there to all intents and purposes he received his whole early education ; consideration of what more conventional training he had may fitly, for the moment, be postponed. His school life counts for very little ; of college life he had practically none ; but among his father's books he read voraciously. " It was in this way," said his sister, " that Robert became very early familiar with subjects generally unknown to boys."

The Parkyings with Certain People of hnportance in tJieir Day, published in 1887, towards the close of his life, has, no less than Pauline at the beginning of his career, a distinctly autobiographical importance, and affords an excellent example of the peculiar home influences exerted upon Browning during his early life. Reference has already been made to Christopher Smart, but he is only one of the seven people with whom the poet of seventy-five supposes himself to be holding converse in his Parleyings. To most readers, perhaps, Gerard de Lairesse, Charles Avison, George Bubb Dodington, Bernard de Mandeville, and Daniel Bartoli are little more than names ; but with Browning the Flemish painter, the Newcastle musician, the eighteenth-century politician, the anglicized Dutchman, and the Italian Jesuit historian, were all " men whose works connected themselves with the intellectual sympathies and the imaginative pleasures of his very earliest youth." ^ For example, Browning's father, as has been mentioned, had desired to be an artist, and among his books was the second English edition, that of 1778, of The Art of Painting in all its Branches, by Gerard de Lairesse. On the fly-leaf of this volume Browning made the following note : —