at we know them, and if Negro blood had any part in their
composition, it was no worse for them, and so much the better for
the Negro.

Aside from this last point, from the evidence that has been given,
while this of course has its limitations, we may safely assert that
with her large humanity and her enthusiasm for liberty, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning was one of the sturdiest defenders in England of the
cause of the American Negro at the time of the beginning of the Civil
War. It is to be regretted that she did not live to read the
Emancipation Proclamation and to see the Negro started on an era of
self-reliance and progress.

BENJAMIN BRAWLEY

FOOTNOTES:

[8] For the inscription we are indebted to the Cambridge edition of
the poems of Mrs. Browning, edited by Harriet Waters Preston, Houghton
Mifflin, Boston, p. xii. Translation: Here wrote and died Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, who united to a woman's heart the learning of a
savant and the inspiration of a poet, and made her verse a golden link
between Italy and England. This tablet was set by grateful Florence in
1861.

[9] _The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning_, edited by Frederic G.
Kenton, 2 vols., Macmillan, New York and London, 1898. Vol. I, p. 21.

[10] _Letters_, I, 23.

[11] _I. e._, Franklin Pierce.

[12] _Letters_, II, 110.

[13] _Letters_, II, 183.

[14] Quoted from _Browning Society Papers_, Part XII, by Elizabeth
Porter Gould in _The Brownings and America_, p. 55.

[15] Mrs. Sutherland Orr, _Life and Letters of Robert Browning_. 2
vols. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1891. Vol. I, p. 8.

PALMARES: THE NEGRO NUMANTIA

One of the most glorious achievements in the history of the Iberian
Peninsula was the long and desperate defence of Numantia against the
Roman legionaries sent to effect the destruction of the city. When the
beleaguered inhabitants could no longer maintain themselves, owing to
the shortage of food supplies, they burned the city, and those who
were not killed in battle with the Romans committed suicide. Scipio
AEmilianus, the Roman leader, entered Numantia to find nothing but
burning embers and piles of corpses.

This incident has an almost exact parallel in the history of
Brazil--only this time the heroes were Negroes, defending the capital
of one of the earliest and one of the strangest Negro republics in the
history of the world. The Portuguese, who were the first t