Bank of England, where he remained for fifty years, till he was
pensioned off in 1821 with over £400 a year. He died in 1833. His wife,
to whom he was married in or about 1780, was one Margaret Morris Tittle,
a Creole, born in the West Indies. Her portrait, by Wright of Derby,
used to hang in the poet's dining-room. They resided, Mr. R. Barrett
Browning tells me, in Battersea, where his grandfather was their
first-born. The paternal grandfather of the poet decided that his three
sons, Robert, William Shergold, and Reuben, should go into business,
the two younger in London, the elder abroad. All three became efficient
financial clerks, and attained to good positions and fair means.[3] The
eldest, Robert, was a man of exceptional powers. He was a poet, both in
sentiment and expression; and he understood, as well as enjoyed, the
excellent in art. He was a scholar, too, in a reputable fashion: not
indifferent to what he had learnt in his youth, nor heedless of the high
opinion generally entertained for the greatest writers of antiquity, but
with a particular care himself for Horace and Anacreon. As his son once
told a friend. "The old gentleman's brain was a storehouse of literary
and philosophical antiquities. He was completely versed in mediæval
legend, and seemed to have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic
personages, personally"--a significant detail, by the way. He was fond
of metrical composition, and his ease and grace in the use of the heroic
couplet were the admiration, not only of his intellectual associates,
but, in later days, of his son, who was wont to affirm, certainly in all
seriousness, that expressionally his father was a finer poetic artist
than himself. Some one has recorded of him that he was an authority on
the Letters of Junius: fortunately he had more tangible claims than this
to the esteem of his fellows. It was his boast that, notwithstanding the
exigencies of his vocation, he knew as much of the history of art as any
professional critic. His extreme modesty is deducible from this naïve
remark. He was an amateur artist, moreover, as well as poet, critic,