s
intention, I know, was to be scrupulously accurate about the facts in
this poem. I may tell you as an instance that, wishing to be sure that
there was moonlight on a particular night, he got a distinguished
mathematician to make the necessary calculation. The description of
the finding of the book is without doubt true in every detail. Indeed,
to this day the market at San Lorenzo is very much what it was then
and as I can remember it. Not long ago, I myself bought an old volume
there off a barrow.

The "Yellow Book" was probably picked up in June of 1860 before going
to Rome for the winter--the last my father passed in Italy. As it had
always been understood that the Book should be presented to Balliol, I
went soon after my father's death to stay a few days with Jowett, and
gave it to him.

In the portrait that hangs in Balliol Hall I painted my father as he
sat to me with the Book in his hands.

Nothing would have gratified him more than what you tell me about the
interest with which his works are studied in America, and I need not
say how much pleasure this gives me.

Believe me with many thanks for your kind letter,

Yours Very Sincerely,

R. BARRETT BROWNING.

A very curious discovery was made in Rome, in the winter of 1900, by
Signer Giorgi, the Librarian of the Royal Casanatense Library, in an
ancient manuscript account of curious legal trials, among which were those
of Beatrice Cenci, of Miguel de Molinos (in 1686), and of the trial and
sentence of Guido Franceschini. The fact that taxes credulity in regard to
this manuscript, of whose existence, even, no one in modern times had ever
dreamed, is that the three points of view, as presented by Browning in
the "Half Rome," "The Other Half Rome," and "Tertium Quid," are in accord
with those given in this strange document, which for more than a century
had lain undisturbed in the archives.

In a little explanation regarding the significance of the closing lines of
"The Ring and the Book," also kindly given by Robert Barrett Browning, it
seems that his mother habitually wore a ring of Etruscan gold, wrought by
Castellani, with the letters "A. E. I." on it; and that after her death
the poet always wore it on his watch-chain, as does now his son. In the
tablet placed on Casa Guidi to the memory of Mrs. Browning (the
inscription of which was written by the Italian poet, Tomma