The `Athenaeum' dismissed "Paracelsus" with a half contemptuous line or two.
On the other hand, the `Examiner' acknowledged it to be
a work of unequivocal power, and predicted for its author a brilliant career.
The same critic who wrote this review contributed an article
of about twenty pages upon "Paracelsus" to the `New Monthly Magazine',
under the heading, "Evidences of a New Dramatic Poetry".
This article is ably written, and remarkable for its sympathetic insight.
"Mr. Browning," the critic writes, "is a man of genius, he has in himself
all the elements of a great poet, philosophical as well as dramatic."

The author of this enthusiastic and important critique was John Forster.
When the `Examiner' review appeared the two young men had not met:
but the encounter, which was to be the seed of so fine a flower of friendship,
occurred before the publication of the `New Monthly' article. Before this,
however, Browning had already made one of the most momentous acquaintanceships
of his life.

His good friend and early critic, Mr. Fox, asked him to his house
one evening in November, a few months after the publication of "Paracelsus".
The chief guest of the occasion was Macready, then at the height
of his great reputation. Mr. Fox had paved the way for the young poet,
but the moment he entered he carried with him his best recommendation.
Every one who met Browning in those early years of his buoyant manhood
seems to have been struck by his comeliness and simple grace of manner.
Macready stated that he looked more like a poet than any man he had ever met.
As a young man he appears to have had a certain ivory delicacy of colouring,
what an old friend perhaps somewhat exaggeratedly described to me
as an almost flower-like beauty, which passed ere long