Browning repeated the French in an undertone, kindling as he went, I
urging him on, our two heads close together. Every now and then he would
look up to see if the plague outside was done, and, finding it still
went on, would plunge again into the seclusion of our tete-a-tete; till
the _chanson_ itself--"_Si le roi m'avoit donne--Paris, sa grand'
ville"_--had been said, to his delight and mine.

The recitation lasted through several courses, and our hostess once or
twice threw uneasy glances toward us, for Browning was the "lion" of the
evening. But, once launched, he was not to be stopped; and as for me, I
shall always remember that I heard Browning--spontaneously, without a
moment's pause to remember or prepare--recite the whole, or almost the
whole, of one of the immortal things in literature.

He was then seventy-two or seventy-three. He came to see us once or
twice in Russell Square, but, alack! we arrived too late in the London
world to know him well. His health began to fail just about the time
when we first met, and early in 1889 he died in the Palazzo Rezzonico.

He did not like _Robert Elsmere_, which appeared the year before his
death; and I was told a striking story by a common friend of his and
mine, who was present at a discussion of the book at a literary house.
Browning, said my friend, was of the party. The discussion turned on the
divinity of Christ. After listening awhile, Browning repeated, with some
passion, the anecdote of Charles Lamb in conversation with Leigh Hunt,
on the subject of "Persons one would wish to have seen"; when, after
ranging through literature and philosophy, Lamb added:

"But without mentioning a name that once put on a semblance of
mortality ... there is only one other Person. If Shakespeare was to