kings, gigantic
failures, and the _Comedie Humaine._ In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William
Blake, Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen, Crome, Sir Thomas Lawrence,
Constable, Sir David Wilkie, and Turner were in the exercise of their
happiest faculties: as were, in the usage of theirs, Beethoven, Weber,
Schubert, Spohr, Donizetti, and Bellini.

It is not inadvisedly that I make this specification of great names, of
men who were born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense
contemporaries of Robert Browning. There is no such thing as a
fortuitous birth. Creation does not occur spontaneously, as in that
drawing of David Scott's where from the footprint of the Omnipotent
spring human spirits and fiery stars. Literally indeed, as a great
French writer has indicated, a man is the child of his time. It is a
matter often commented upon by students of literature, that great men do
not appear at the beginning, but rather at the acme of a period. They
are not the flying scud of the coming wave, but the gleaming crown of
that wave itself. The epoch expends itself in preparation for these
great ones.

If Nature's first law were not a law of excess, the economy of life
would have meagre results. I think it is Turgeniev who speaks somewhere
of her as a gigantic Titan, working in gloomy silence, with the same
savage intentness upon a subtler twist of a flea's joints as upon the
Destinies of Man.

If there be a more foolish cry than that poetry is on the wane, it is
that the great days had passed away even before Robert Browning and
Alfred Tennyson were born. The way was prepared for Browning, as it was
for Shakspere: as it is, beyond doubt, for the next high peer of these.

There were 'Roberts' among the sons of the Browning family for at least
four generations. It has been affirmed, on disputable authority, that
the surname is the English equivalent for Bruning, and that the family
is of Teutonic origin. Possibly: but this origin is too remote to be of
any practical concern. Browning himself, it may be added, told Mr.
Moncure Conway that the original name was De Bruni. It is not a matter
of much importance: the poet was, personally and to a great extent in
his genius, Anglo-Saxon. Though there are plausible grounds for the
assumption. I can find nothing to substantiate the common assertion
that, immediately, or remotely, his people were Jews.[1]

[Footnote 1: Fairly conclusive evidence to the contrary, on the paternal
side, is af