nd's classical attainments was quite as
great as his gratification in the tribute he himself derived from them.

His love of genius was a worship: and in this we must include his whole
life. Nor was it, as this feeling so often is, exclusively exercised
upon the past. I do not suppose his more eminent contemporaries ever
quite knew how generous his enthusiasm for them had been, how free from
any under-current of envy, or impulse to avoidable criticism. He could
not endure even just censure of one whom he believed, or had believed
to be great. I have seen him wince under it, though no third person was
present, and heard him answer, 'Don't! don't!' as if physical pain were
being inflicted on him. In the early days he would make his friend, M.
de Monclar, draw for him from memory the likenesses of famous writers
whom he had known in Paris; the sketches thus made of George Sand and
Victor Hugo are still in the poet's family. A still more striking
and very touching incident refers to one of the winters, probably the
second, which he spent in Paris. He was one day walking with little Pen,
when Beranger came in sight, and he bade the child 'run up to' or 'run
past that gentleman, and put his hand for a moment upon him.' This was
a great man, he afterwards explained, and he wished his son to be able
by-and-by to say that if he had not known, he had at all events touched
him. Scientific genius ranked with him only second to the poetical.

Mr. Browning's delicate professional sympathies justified some
sensitiveness on his own account; but he was, I am convinced, as free
from this quality as a man with a poet-nature could possibly be. It may
seem hazardous to conjecture how serious criticism would have affected
him. Few men so much 'reviewed' have experienced so little. He was by
turns derided or ignored, enthusiastically praised, zealously analyzed
and interpreted: but the independent judgment which could embrace at
once the quality of his mind and its defects, is almost absent--has been
so at all events during later years--from the volumes which have been
written about him. I am convinced, nevertheless, that he would have
accepted serious, even adverse criticism, if it had borne the impress of
unbiassed thought and genuine sincerity. It could not be otherwise with
one in whom the power of reverence was so strongly marked.

He asked but one thing of his reviewers, as he asked but one thing of
his larger public. The first demand