urs after 1542 in different
parts of the country: in two cases with the affix of 'esquire', in two
also, though not in both coincidently, within twenty miles of Pentridge,
where the first distinct traces of the poet's family appear. Its cradle,
as he called it, was Woodyates, in the parish of Pentridge, on the
Wiltshire confines of Dorsetshire; and there his ancestors, of the third
and fourth generations, held, as we understand, a modest but independent
social position.

* I am indebted for these facts, as well as for some others
referring to, or supplied by, Mr. Browning's uncles,
to some notes made for the Browning Society by Dr. Furnivall.

This fragment of history, if we may so call it, accords better with our
impression of Mr. Browning's genius than could any pedigree which more
palpably connected him with the 'knightly' and 'squirely' families whose
name he bore. It supplies the strong roots of English national life
to which we instinctively refer it. Both the vivid originality of that
genius and its healthy assimilative power stamp it as, in some sense,
the product of virgin soil; and although the varied elements which
entered into its growth were racial as well as cultural, and inherited
as well as absorbed, the evidence of its strong natural or physical
basis remains undisturbed.

Mr. Browning, for his own part, maintained a neutral attitude in the
matter. He neither claimed nor disclaimed the more remote genealogical
past which had presented itself as a certainty to some older members of
his family. He preserved the old framed coat-of-arms handed down to him
from his grandfather; and used, without misgiving as to his right to do
so, a signet-ring engraved from it, the gift of a favourite uncle, in
years gone by. But, so long as he was young, he had no reason to think
about his ancestors; and, when he was old, he had no reason to care
about them; he knew himself to be, in every possible case, the most
important fact in his family history.

Roi ne suis, ni Prince aussi,
Suis le seigneur de Conti,

he wrote, a few years back, to a friend who had incidentally questioned
him about it.

Our immediate knowledge of the family begins with Mr. Browning's
grandfather, also a Robert Browning, who obtained through Lord
Shaftesbury's influence a clerkship in the Bank of England, and entered
on it when barely twenty, in 1769. He served fifty years, and rose to
the position of Principal of the