red _Pauline_ many years later, was a sufficient
compensation for the general indifference or neglect. "When Mr Browning
was living in Florence, he received a letter from a young painter whose
name was quite unknown to him, asking him whether he were the author of
a poem called _Pauline_, which was somewhat in his manner, and which the
writer had so greatly admired that he had transcribed the whole of it in
the British Museum reading-room. The letter was signed D.G. Rossetti,
and thus began Mr Browning's acquaintance with this eminent man."[14]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: By Dr Furnivall; see _The Academy_, April 12, 1902.]

[Footnote 2: "Letters of R.B. and E.B.B.," ii. 477.]

[Footnote 3: Letter of R.B. to E.B.B.]

[Footnote 4: Dr Moncure Conway states that Browning told him that the
original name of the family was De Buri. According to Mrs Orr, Browning
"neither claimed nor disclaimed the more remote genealogical past which
had presented itself as a certainty to some older members of his
family."]

[Footnote 5: Quoted by Mr Sharp in his "Life of Browning," p. 21, _n_.,
from Mrs Fraser Cockran.]

[Footnote 6: "Autobiography of a Journalist," i. 277.]

[Footnote 7: For my quotations and much of the above information I am
indebted to Mr F. Herbert Stead, Warden of the Robert Browning
Settlement, Walworth. In Robert Browning Hall are preserved the
baptismal registers of Robert (June 14th, 1812), and Sarah Anna
Browning, with other documents from which I have quoted.]

[Footnote 8: _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B_., i. 528, 529; and (for
Ossian), ii. 469.]

[Footnote 9: Browning in a letter to Mr Wise says that this happened
"some time before 1830 (or even earlier). The books," he says, "were
obtained in the _regular way_, from Hunt and Clarke." Mr Gosse in
_Personalia_ gives a different account, pp. 23, 24.]

[Footnote 10: The quotations from letters above are taken from J.C.
Hadden's article "Some Friends of Browning" in _Macmillan's Magazine_,
Jan. 1898.]

[Footnote 11: Later in life Browning came to think unfavourably of
Shelley as a man and to esteem him less highly as a poet. He wrote in
December 1885 to Dr Furnivall: "For myself I painfully contrast my
notions of Shelley the _man_ and Shelley, well, even the _poet_, with
what they were sixty years ago." He declined Dr Furnivall's invitation
to him to accept the presidency of "The Shelley Society."]

[Footnote 12: Even the publishers--Saunders and Otley--di