she urged, they could not afford to send their other sons to college. An
earlier ambition of his had been to become an artist; but when he showed
his first completed picture to his father, the latter turned away and
refused to look at it. He gave himself the finishing stroke in the
parental eyes, by throwing up a lucrative employment which he had held
for a short time on his mother's West Indian property, in disgust at the
system of slave labour which was still in force there; and he paid for
this unpractical conduct as soon as he was of age, by the compulsory
reimbursement of all the expenses which his father, up to that date, had
incurred for him; and by the loss of his mother's fortune, which, at the
time of her marriage, had not been settled upon her. It was probably
in despair of doing anything better, that, soon after this, in his
twenty-second year, he also became a clerk in the Bank of England. He
married and settled in Camberwell, in 1811; his son and daughter were
born, respectively, in 1812 and 1814. He became a widower in 1849; and
when, four years later, he had completed his term of service at the
Bank, he went with his daughter to Paris, where they resided until his
death in 1866.

Dr. Furnivall has originated a theory, and maintains it as a conviction,
that Mr. Browning's grandmother was more than a Creole in the strict
sense of the term, that of a person born of white parents in the West
Indies, and that an unmistakable dash of dark blood passed from her to
her son and grandson. Such an occurrence was, on the face of it, not
impossible, and would be absolutely unimportant to my mind, and, I think
I may add, to that of Mr. Browning's sister and son. The poet and his
father were what we know them, and if negro blood had any part in their
composition, it was no worse for them, and so much the better for the
negro. But many persons among us are very averse to the idea of such
a cross; I believe its assertion, in the present case, to be entirely
mistaken; I prefer, therefore, touching on the facts alleged in favour
of it, to passing them over in a silence which might be taken to mean
indifference, but might also be interpreted into assent.

We are told that Mr. Browning was so dark in early life, that a nephew
who saw him in Paris, in 1837, mistook him for an Italian. He neither
had nor could have had a nephew; and he was not out of England at the
time specified. It is said that when Mr. Browning senior was r