the business,
so easy to almost anybody, is too bewildering for oneself. Ever truly
yours, Robert Browning.

A Rectorial Address need probably not have been extemporized, but it
would also have been irksome to him to prepare. He was not accustomed
to uttering himself in prose except within the limits, and under
the incitements, of private correspondence. The ceremonial publicity
attaching to all official proceedings would also have inevitably been a
trial to him. He did at one of the Wordsworth Society meetings speak a
sentence from the chair, in the absence of the appointed chairman,
who had not yet arrived; and when he had received his degree from the
University of Edinburgh he was persuaded to say a few words to the
assembled students, in which I believe he thanked them for their warm
welcome; but such exceptions only proved the rule.

We cannot doubt that the excited stream of talk which sometimes flowed
from him was, in the given conditions of mind and imagination, due to
a nervous impulse which he could not always restrain; and that the
effusiveness of manner with which he greeted alike old friends and new,
arose also from a momentary want of self-possession. We may admit this
the more readily that in both cases it was allied to real kindness
of intention, above all in the latter, where the fear of seeming cold
towards even a friend's friend, strove increasingly with the defective
memory for names and faces which were not quite familiar to him. He was
also profoundly averse to the idea of posing as a man of superior
gifts; having indeed, in regard to social intercourse, as little of the
fastidiousness of genius as of its bohemianism. He, therefore, made it
a rule, from the moment he took his place as a celebrity in the London
world, to exert himself for the amusement of his fellow-guests at a
dinner-table, whether their own mental resources were great or small;
and this gave rise to a frequent effort at conversation, which converted
itself into a habit, and ended by carrying him away. This at least was
his own conviction in the matter. The loud voice, which so many persons
must have learned to think habitual with him, bore also traces of this
half-unconscious nervous stimulation.* It was natural to him in anger
or excitement, but did not express his gentler or more equable states
of feeling; and when he read to others on a subject which moved him,
his utterance often subsided into a tremulous softness which lef