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mate friend, but the world in general is influenced by the portrait presented to it, and in this there is unfortunately little claim upon its sympathies, If Robert Browning was no more personally than Mrs Sutherland Orr’s representation of him, it may be a question whether it would not have been wiser to leave us with the very sufficient evidence of his works as to his great qualities, without thus bringing down the ideal of the poet to ordinary flesh and blood. The disillusion of biography has been complete in so many recent cases, that writers ought to be warned in time from undertaking such a thankless task, unless with a certainty of being of service to their subject. Why should we be compelled to admit that a writer of fine genius and noble powers, one of the most humorous and comprehensive of intelligences, was in the flesh a dull woman? and why should we be driven to allow that a great poet was a commonplace man? This is a spite of fate to which we ought not to be subjected. If this is all there is to say, it would have been much better that it should not have been said.

Those who are desirous to know whether there was any truth in the rumour that Mr Browning was of Jewish extraction, or that he was influenced in later life by the powers of Dissent which surrounded his cradle, will be able to make up their minds on these subjects by perusal of this book; and they will also be able to trace the different places in which he lived, and the people whom he met in his long career; as well as the dates of his poems, and of other interesting events in his life, which are all important, no doubt. It was not a life in which there were many incidents. His marriage was of a somewhat romantic and unusual kind, and his wife a personage as interesting to the public as himself. He shared at least his eminence with another, and if not second to Lord Tennyson, was never at least more than on a level with that great master of verse. But Mrs Browning was unique, the acknowledged first of women poets; so that the mere fact of their union is a dazzling kind of record for a parish register. But there does not seem ever to have been any struggle with life in the case of either. Browning was permitted in his youth by a kind and comprehending father to choose that unpromising trade of Poetry, the mere suggestion of which makes most fathers foam at the mouth. And he was not obliged to live by his trade, which, seeing that it brought him in nothing for many years, was a lucky circumstance. This was an excellent thing for him; but it is less desirable for his biographer, who has really very little to tell, of the youth who produced “Sordello” and “Paracelsus” as the first fruits of his genius, but who, though wounded no doubt by the cruel indifference of the public, never missed a comfort or pleasure in consequence of his non-success.

Would, we say (in the interests of the story), that he had gone threadbare like the sons of the Muse in earlier days; would that he had worn out his last pair of boots in his search for a patron or a publisher! Crabbe, for instance, is a poet of a grim and sombre cast, and he ended his life as a comfortable clergyman; but what an entertaining, amusing, pathetic story is that of his peregrinations and tribulation before any one would look at his work! Mr Browning had no such episodes in his early career.