ss
which had forced him into an uncongenial career. Its only palpable
result was to make him a more anxiously indulgent parent when his own
time came.

* I have been told that, far from becoming careless in the
use of these things from his practically unbounded command
of them, he developed for them an almost superstitious
reverence. He could never endure to see a scrap of writing-
paper wasted.

Many circumstances conspired to secure to the coming poet a happier
childhood and youth than his father had had. His path was to be smoothed
not only by natural affection and conscientious care, but by literary
and artistic sympathy. The second Mr. Browning differed, in certain
respects, as much from the third as from the first. There were,
nevertheless, strong points in which, if he did not resemble, he at
least distinctly foreshadowed him; and the genius of the one would lack
some possible explanation if we did not recognize in great measure its
organized material in the other. Much, indeed, that was genius in the
son existed as talent in the father. The moral nature of the younger
man diverged from that of the older, though retaining strong points of
similarity; but the mental equipments of the two differed far less
in themselves than in the different uses to which temperament and
circumstances trained them.

The most salient intellectual characteristic of Mr. Browning senior was
his passion for reading. In his daughter's words, 'he read in season,
and out of season;' and he not only read, but remembered. As a
schoolboy, he knew by heart the first book of the 'Iliad', and all
the odes of Horace; and it shows how deeply the classical part of his
training must have entered into him, that he was wont, in later life, to
soothe his little boy to sleep by humming to him an ode of Anacreon. It
was one of his amusements at school to organize Homeric combats among
the boys, in which the fighting was carried on in the manner of the
Greeks and Trojans, and he and his friend Kenyon would arm themselves
with swords and shields, and hack at each other lustily, exciting
themselves to battle by insulting speeches derived from the Homeric
text.*

* This anecdote is partly quoted from Mrs. Andrew Crosse,
who has introduced it into her article 'John Kenyon and his
Friends',
'Temple Bar', April 1890. She herself received it from Mr.
Dykes Campbell.

Mr. Browning had also an extra