carefully read all of Johnson's Dictionary "as a fit preparation for a
literary career." Without any attempt to deny that the perusal of a
dictionary is "fit preparation for a literary career," I yet fear me that
the learned biographer, in a warm anxiety to prove the man exceeding
studious and very virtuous, has tipped a bit to t' other side.

She has apotheosized her subject--and in an attempt to portray him as a
peculiar person, set apart, has well-nigh given us a being without hands,
feet, eyes, ears, organs, dimensions, passions.

But after a careful study of the data, various visits to the places where
he lived in England, trips to Casa Guidi, views from Casa Guidi windows, a
journey to Palazzo Rezzonico at Venice, where he died, and many a pious
pilgrimage to Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey, where he sleeps, I am
constrained to believe that Robert Browning was made from the same kind of
clay as the rest of us. He was human--he was splendidly human.

* * * * *

Browning's father was a bank-clerk; and Robert Browning, the Third, author
of "Paracelsus," could have secured his father's place in the Bank of
England, if he had had ambitions. And the fact that he had not was a
source of silent sorrow to the father, even to the day of his death, in
Eighteen Hundred Sixty-six.

Robert Browning, the grandfather, entered the Bank as an errand-boy, and
rose by slow stages to Principal of the Stock-Room. He served the Bank
full half a century, and saved from his salary a goodly competence. This
money, tightly and rightly invested, passed to his son. The son never
secured the complete favor of his employers that the father had known, but