n their sensibility.

Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedermann, a
German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One
of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union
of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it
is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical
danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother
unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training--a very
strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle
called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a
very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of
Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections
of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines
two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of
this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear
to look at places where she had walked.

Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum.
In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which,
according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave
because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he
undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which
again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did
not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took
place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and
most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream
fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediaeval chronicles. If we
test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities,
Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English
literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we
shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived;
that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he
has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used
to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy.
Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of
knowledge--knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the
Provencal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle
Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and