insensible to that," she
adds, evidently referring to the meeting with the young prince.

Mrs. Browning's love for novels seemed to have been inherited by her son,
for this winter he was reading an Italian translation of "Monte Cristo"
with such enthusiasm as to resolve to devote his life to fiction. "Dear
Mama," he gravely remarked, "for the future I mean to read novels. I shall
read all Dumas's to begin."

On their return to Florence in the spring, Mrs. Browning gives William
Page a letter of introduction to Ruskin, commending Mr. Page "as a man
earnest, simple and noble, who "has not been successful in life, and when
I say life I include art, which is life to him. You will recognize in this
name _Page_," she continues, "the painter of Robert's portrait which you
praised for its Venetian color, and criticised in other respects," she
concluded. And she desires Ruskin to know the "wonder and light and color
and space and air" that Page had put into his "Venus Rising from the Sea,"
which the Paris salon of that summer had refused on the ground of its
nudity,--a scruple that certainly widely differentiates the Salon of 1858
from that of 1911.

Salvini, even then already recognized as a great artist, was playing in a
theater in Florence that spring, and the Brownings saw with great
enjoyment and admiration his impersonations of Hamlet and Othello.

On a glowing June morning Browning was crossing the Piazza San Lorenzo,
when the market-folk had all their curious wares of odds and ends spread
about on tables. At one of these he chanced on "the square old yellow
book" which held the story of the Franceschini tragedy, which the poet's
art transmuted into his greatest poem, "The Ring and the Book." No other
single work of Browning's can rival this in scope and power. It would seem
as if he had, at the moment, almost a prescience of the incalculable value
of this crumpled and dilapidated volume; as if he intuitively recognized
what he afterward referred to as "the predestination." On his way homeward
he opened the book;

"... through street and street,
At the Strozzi, at the Pillar, at the Bridge;
Till, by the time I stood at home again
In Casa Guidi by Felice Church,

* * * * *

I had mastered the contents, knew the whole truth."

In this brief time he had comprehended the entire story of the trial and
execution of Count Guido Franceschino, Nobleman of Arezzo, for th