any other English poet since Byron.
Browning, on the contrary, with his long and brilliant gallery of
European creations, Browning, who claimed Italy as his "university,"
remains, as a poet, all but unknown even in Italy, and all but
non-existent for the rest of the civilised world beyond the Channel. His
cosmopolitan sympathies worked through the medium of a singularly
individual intellect; and the detaching and isolating effect which
pronounced individuality of thinking usually produces, even in a genial
temperament, was heightened in his case by a robust indifference to
conventions of all kinds, and not least to those which make genius
easily intelligible to the plain man.

What is known of Browning's descent makes these contrasts in some degree
intelligible. An old strain of Wessex squires or yeomen, dimly
discernible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, issued, about
the middle of the eighteenth, in the first distinct personality among
the poet's forebears, his grandfather, who also bore the name Robert. He
was a robust, hard-headed, energetic, pushing man of business and the
world, who made his way from a clerkship to an important and responsible
post in the Bank of England, and settled accounts with religion and with
literature in a right English way, by reading the Bible and 'Tom Jones'
through every year, and very little else. More problematical and
elusive is the figure of his first wife, Margaret Tittle, with whom, to
judge from the character of her eldest son, literary and artistic
sensibility first mingled in the hard practical Browning stock. In this
second Robert Browning, indeed, the somewhat brutal and grasping egotism
of the father gave place to a cultured humanity of almost feminine
tenderness and charm. All his life long he was passionately devoted to
literature, to art, to children. He collected rare books and prints with
avidity, but was no less generous in giving them away. Indifferent to
money, he hated to see a scrap of paper wasted. He had a neat touch in
epigrams, and a boyish delight in grotesque rhymes. But there was no
lack of grit in this accomplished, fresh-minded, and lovable man. He had
the tough fibre of his race; only it was the wrongs of others that
called out its tenacity, not his own. While holding an appointment on
his mother's West Indian estate, he braved the fierce resentment of the
whole colony by teaching a negro-boy to read; and finally incurred
disinheritance rather