a more constant study of our national literature. Byron was his chief
master in those early poetic days. He never ceased to honour him as the
one poet who combined a constructive imagination with the more technical
qualities of his art; and the result of this period of aesthetic
training was a volume of short poems produced, we are told, when he was
only twelve, in which the Byronic influence was predominant.

The young author gave his work the title of 'Incondita', which conveyed
a certain idea of deprecation. He was, nevertheless, very anxious to see
it in print; and his father and mother, poetry-lovers of the old
school, also found in it sufficient merit to justify its publication.
No publisher, however, could be found; and we can easily believe that
he soon afterwards destroyed the little manuscript, in some mingled
reaction of disappointment and disgust. But his mother, meanwhile, had
shown it to an acquaintance of hers, Miss Flower, who herself admired
its contents so much as to make a copy of them for the inspection of her
friend, the well-known Unitarian minister, Mr. W. J. Fox. The copy was
transmitted to Mr. Browning after Mr. Fox's death by his daughter, Mrs.
Bridell-Fox; and this, if no other, was in existence in 1871, when, at
his urgent request, that lady also returned to him a fragment of verse
contained in a letter from Miss Sarah Flower. Nor was it till much later
that a friend, who had earnestly begged for a sight of it, definitely
heard of its destruction. The fragment, which doubtless shared the same
fate, was, I am told, a direct imitation of Coleridge's 'Fire, Famine,
and Slaughter'.

These poems were not Mr. Browning's first. It would be impossible to
believe them such when we remember that he composed verses long before
he could write; and a curious proof of the opposite fact has recently
appeared. Two letters of the elder Mr. Browning have found their way