[Footnote 2: See _Notes and Queries_ for July 20, 1889, supplemented
by a note from Mr. Browning himself in the same paper on August 24.]

Nothing is to be gained by trying to trace back the genealogy of the
Barrett family, and it need merely be noted that it had been
connected for some generations with the island of Jamaica, and owned
considerable estates there.[3] It is a curious coincidence that Robert
Browning was likewise in part of West Indian descent, and so, too, was
John Kenyon, the lifelong friend of both, by whose means the poet and
poetess were first introduced to one another.

[Footnote 3: These estates still remain in the family, and Mr. Charles
Barrett, the eldest surviving brother of Mrs. Browning, now lives
there.]

The family of Mr. Edward Barrett was a fairly large one, consisting,
besides Elizabeth, of two daughters, Henrietta and Arabel, and eight
sons--Edward, whose tragic death at Torquay saddened so much of his
sister's life, Charles (the 'Stormie' of the letters), Samuel, George,
Henry, Alfred, Septimus, and Octavius; Mr. Barrett's inventiveness
having apparently given out with the last two members of his family,
reducing him to the primitive method of simple enumeration, an
enumeration in which, it may be observed, the daughters counted for
nothing. Not many of these, however, can have been born at Coxhoe; for
while Elizabeth was still an infant--apparently about the beginning
of the year 1809--Mr. Barrett removed to his newly purchased estate
of Hope End, in Herefordshire, among the Malvern hills, and only a few
miles from Malvern itself. It is to Hope End that the admirers of Mrs.
Browning must look as the real home of her childhood and youth. Here