very early familiar with the names of the great painters, and also
learned something about their work; for the Dulwich Gallery was within a
pleasant walk of his home, and his father constantly took him there. He
retained through life a deep interest in art and artists, and became a
very familiar figure in one or two London studios. Some drawings made
by him from the nude, in Italy, and for which he had prepared himself by
assiduous copying of casts and study of human anatomy, had, I believe,
great merit. But painting was one of the subjects in which he never
received instruction, though he modelled, under the direction of his
friend Mr. Story; and a letter of his own will presently show that, in
his youth at least, he never credited himself with exceptional artistic
power. That he might have become an artist, and perhaps a great one,
is difficult to doubt, in the face of his brilliant general ability and
special gifts. The power to do a thing is, however, distinct from the
impulse to do it, and proved so in the present case.

More importance may be given to an idea of his father's that he should
qualify himself for the Bar. It would naturally coincide with the
widening of the social horizon which his University College classes
supplied; it was possibly suggested by the fact that the closest friends
he had already made, and others whom he was perhaps now making, were
barristers. But this also remained an idea. He might have been placed in
the Bank of England, where the virtual offer of an appointment had been
made to him through his father; but the elder Browning spontaneously
rejected this, as unworthy of his son's powers. He had never, he said,
liked bank work himself, and could not, therefore, impose it on him.

We have still to notice another, and a more mistaken view of the
possibilities of Mr. Browning's life. It has been recently stated,
doubtless on the authority of some words of his own, that the Church was