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--did not know the
author's name.--"Letters of R.B. and E.B.B.," i. 403.]

[Footnote 13: "V.A. xx," following the quotation from Cornelius Agrippa
means "Vixi annos xx," _i.e._ "the imaginary subject of the poem was of
that age."--Browning to Mr T.J. Wise.]