unting from the time of preliminary
assemblage, six hours and a half engaged: _fully_ five and a half nailed
to our chairs at the table: but the whole thing was brilliant, genial,
and suggestive of many and various thoughts to me--and there was
a warmth, earnestness, and yet refinement about it which I never
experienced in any previous public dinner. Next morning I breakfasted
with Jowett and his guests, found that return would be difficult: while
as the young men were to return on Friday there would be no opposition
to my departure on Thursday. The morning was dismal with rain, but after
luncheon there was a chance of getting a little air, and I walked for
more than two hours, then heard service in New Coll.--then dinner again:
my room had been prepared in the Master's house. So, on Thursday, after
yet another breakfast, I left by the noon-day train, after all sorts of
kindly offices from the Master. . . . No reporters were suffered to be
present--the account in yesterday's Times was furnished by one or more
of the guests; it is quite correct as far as it goes. There were,
I find, certain little paragraphs which must have been furnished by
'guessers': Swinburne, set down as present--was absent through his
Father's illness: the Cardinal also excused himself as did the Bishop of
Salisbury and others. . . . Ever yours R. Browning.

The second letter, from Cambridge, was short and written in haste, at
the moment of Mr. Browning's departure; but it tells the same tale of
general kindness and attention. Engagements for no less than six meals
had absorbed the first day of the visit. The occasion was that of
Professor Joachim's investiture with his Doctor's degree; and Mr.
Browning declares that this ceremony, the concert given by the great
violinist, and his society, were 'each and all' worth the trouble of
the journey. He himself was to receive the Cambridge degree of LL.D. in
1879, the Oxford D.C.L. in 1882. A passage in another letter addressed
to the same friend, refers probably to a practical reminiscence of 'Red
Cotton Nightcap Country', which enlivened the latter experience, and
which Mrs. Fitz-Gerald had witnessed with disapprobation.*

* An actual red cotton nightcap had been made to flutter
down on to the Poet's head.

. . . You are far too hard on the very harmless drolleries of the young
men, licensed as they are moreover by immemorial usage. Indeed there
used to be a regularly appointed jester, 'F