and student. I have seen several of his drawings which are
praise-worthy: his studies in portraiture, particularly, are ably
touched: and, as is well known, he had an active faculty of pictorial
caricature. In the intervals of leisure which beset the best regulated
clerk he was addicted to making drawings of the habitual visitors to the
Bank of England, in which he had obtained a post on his return, in 1803,
from the West Indies, and in the enjoyment of which he remained till
1853, when he retired on a small pension. His son had an independent
income, but whether from a bequest, or in the form of an allowance from
his then unmarried Uncle Reuben, is uncertain. In the first year of his
marriage Mr. Browning resided in an old house in Southampton Street,
Peckham, and there the poet was born. The house was long ago pulled
down, and another built on its site. Mr. Browning afterwards removed to
another domicile in the same Peckham district. Many years later, he and
his family left Camberwell and resided at Hatcham, near New Cross, where
his brothers and sisters (by his father's second marriage) lived. There
was a stable attached to the Hatcham house, and in it Mr. Reuben
Browning kept his horse, which he let his poet-nephew ride, while he
himself was at his desk in Rothschild's bank. No doubt this horse was
the 'York' alluded to by the poet in the letter quoted, as a footnote,
at page 189 of this book. Some years after his wife's death, which
occurred in 1849, Mr. Browning left Hatcham and came to Paddington, but
finally went to reside in Paris, and lived there, in a small street off
the Champs Élysées, till his death in 1866. The Creole strain seems to
have been distinctly noticeable in Mr. Browning, so much so that it is
possible it had something to do with his unwillingness to remain at St.
Kitts, where he was certainly on one occasion treated cavalierly enough.
The poet's complexion in youth, light and ivory-toned as it was in later
life, has been described as olive, and it is said that one of his
nephews, who met him in Paris in his early manhood, took him for an