evening. The names of those whom it had brought together, almost all to
be sooner or later numbered among the Poet's friends, were indeed
enough to stamp it as worthy of recollection. One or two characteristic
utterances of Mr. Browning are, however, the only ones which it
seems advisable to repeat here. The conversation having turned on the
celebration of the Shakespeare ter-centenary, he said: 'Here we are
called upon to acknowledge Shakespeare, we who have him in our very
bones and blood, our very selves. The very recognition of Shakespeare's
merits by the Committee reminds me of nothing so apt as an illustration,
as the decree of the Directoire that men might acknowledge God.'

Among the subjects discussed was the advisability of making schoolboys
write English verses as well as Latin and Greek. 'Woolner and Sir
Francis Doyle were for this; Gladstone and Browning against it.'

Work had now found its fitting place in the Poet's life. It was no
longer the overflow of an irresistible productive energy; it was the
deliberate direction of that energy towards an appointed end. We hear
something of his own feeling concerning this in a letter of August '65,
again from Ste.-Marie, and called forth by some gossip concerning him
which Miss Blagden had connected with his then growing fame.

'. . . I suppose that what you call "my fame within these four years"
comes from a little of this gossiping and going about, and showing
myself to be alive: and so indeed some folks say--but I hardly think it:
for remember I was uninterruptedly (almost) in London from the time
I published 'Paracelsus' till I ended that string of plays with
'Luria'--and I used to go out then, and see far more of merely literary
people, critics &c. than I do now,--but what came of it? There were
always a few people who had a certain opinion of my poems, but nobody
cared to speak what he thought, or the things printed twenty-five years
ago would not have waited so long for a good word; but at last a new set
of men arrive who don't mind the conventionalities of ignoring one and
seeing everything in another--Chapman says, "the new orders come from
Oxford and Cambridge," and all my new cultivators are young men--more
than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't like at all
the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private
approval, and take those words out of their mouths "which they always
meant to say" and never did. When there g