alities than drawing-rooms or clubs, through
other organs than newspapers or magazines, by other and larger groups
of persons than those usually gathered round a dinner-or a tea-table,
involved no real change in the situation. In any case, he had made
himself public property; and those who thus organized their study of him
were exercising an individual right. If his own rights had been assailed
he would have guarded them also; but the circumstances of the case
precluded such a contingency. And he had his reward. How he felt towards
the Society at the close of its first session is better indicated in the
following letter to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald than in the note to Mr. Yates which
Mr. Sharp has published, and which was written with more reserve and, I
believe, at a rather earlier date. Even the shade of condescension which
lingers about his words will have been effaced by subsequent experience;
and many letters written to Dr. Furnivall must, since then, have
attested his grateful and affectionate appreciation of kindness intended
and service done to him.

. . . They always treat me gently in 'Punch'--why don't you do the
same by the Browning Society? I see you emphasize Miss Hickey's
acknowledgement of defects in time and want of rehearsal: but I look
for no great perfection in a number of kindly disposed strangers to
me personally, who try to interest people in my poems by singing and
reading them. They give their time for nothing, offer their little
entertainment for nothing, and certainly get next to nothing in the way
of thanks--unless from myself who feel grateful to the faces I shall
never see, the voices I shall never hear. The kindest notices I have
had, or at all events those that have given me most pleasure, have been
educed by this Society--A. Sidgwick's paper, that of Professor Corson,
Miss Lewis' article in this month's 'Macmillan'--and I feel grateful for
it all, for my part,--and none the less for a little amusement at the
wonder of some of my friends that I do not jump up and denounce the
practices which must annoy me so much. Oh! my 'gentle Shakespeare', how
well you felt and said--'never anything can be amiss when simpleness and
duty tender it.' So, dear Lady, here is my duty and simplicity tendering
itself to you, with all affection besides, and I being ever yours, R.
Browning.

That general disposition of the London world which left the ranks of the
little Society to be three-fourths recruited among p