forded in the fact that, in 1757, the poet's
great-grandfather gave one of his sons the baptismal name of Christian.
Dr. Furnivall's latest researches prove that there is absolutely "no
ground for supposing the presence of any Jewish blood in the poet's
veins."]

As to Browning's physiognomy and personal traits, this much may be
granted: if those who knew him were told he was a Jew they would not be
much surprised. In his exuberant vitality, in his sensuous love of music
and the other arts, in his combined imaginativeness and shrewdness of
common sense, in his superficial expansiveness and actual reticence, he
would have been typical enough of the potent and artistic race for whom
he has so often of late been claimed.

What, however, is most to the point is that neither to curious
acquaintances nor to intimate friends, neither to Jews nor Gentiles, did
he ever admit more than that he was a good Protestant, and sprung of a
Puritan stock. He was tolerant of all religious forms, but with a
natural bias towards Anglican Evangelicalism.

In appearance there was, perhaps, something of the Semite in Robert
Browning: yet this is observable but slightly in the portraits of him
during the last twenty years, and scarcely at all in those which
represent him as a young man. It is most marked in the drawing by Rudolf
Lehmann, representing Browning at the age of forty-seven, where he looks
out upon us with a physiognomy which is, at least, as much distinctively
Jewish as English. Possibly the large dark eyes (so unlike both in
colour and shape what they were in later life) and curved nose and full
lips, with the oval face, may have been, as it were, seen judaically by
the artist. These characteristics, again, are greatly modified in Mr.
Lehmann's subsequent portrait in oils.

The poet's paternal great-grandfather, who was owner of the Woodyates
Inn, in the parish of Pentridge, in Dorsetshire, claimed to come of good
west-country stock. Browning believed, but always conscientiously
maintained there was no proof in support of the assumption, that he was
a descendant of the Captain Micaiah Browning who, as Macaulay relates in
his _History of England_, raised the siege of Derry in 1689 by springing
the boom across Lough Foyle, and perished in the act. The same ancestral
line is said to comprise the Captain Browning who commanded the ship
_The Holy Ghost_, which conveyed Henry V. to France before he fought the
Battle of Agincourt, and