“Casa Guidi, Wednesday.”

Here is also one other little memorial, written not by “Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” but by “Elizabeth Barrett.”  It is interesting on more than one account.  It bears no date, save “Beacon Terrace [Torquay], Thursday,” But it evidently marks the beginning of acquaintanceship between the two exceptionally, though not equally gifted girls—­Elizabeth Barrett and Theodosia Garrow.  It is written on a sheet of the very small duodecimo note paper which she was wont to use many years subsequently, but in far more delicate and elegant characters than she used, when much pen-work had produced its usual deteriorating effect on her caligraphy.

* * * * *

“I cannot return the Book of Beauty” [Lady Blessington’s annual] “to Miss Garrow without thanking her for allowing me to read in it sooner than I should otherwise have done, those contributions of her own which help to justify its title, and which are indeed sweet and touching verses.

“It is among the vexations brought upon me by my illness, that I still remain personally unacquainted with Miss Garrow, though seeming to myself to know her through those who actually do so.  And I should venture to hope that it might be a vexation the first to leave me, if a visit to an invalid condemned to the peine forte et dure of being very silent, notwithstanding her womanhood, were a less gloomy thing.  At any rate I am encouraged to thank Miss Fisher and Miss Garrow for their visits of repeated inquiry, and their other very kind attentions, by these written words, rather than by a message.  For I am sure that wherever kindness can come thankfulness may, and that whatever intrusion my note can be guilty of, it is excusable by the fact of my being Miss Garrow’s

“Sincerely obliged,

“E.  BARRETT.”

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Could anything be more charmingly girlish, or more prettily worded!  The diminutive little note seems to have been preserved, an almost solitary survival of the memorials of the days to which it belongs.  It must doubtless have been followed by sundry others, but was, I suppose, specially treasured as having been the first step towards a friendship which was already highly valued.

Of course, in the recollections of an Englishman living during those years in Florence, Robert Browning must necessarily stand out in high relief, and in the foremost line.  But very obviously this is neither the time nor the place, nor is my dose of presumption sufficient for any attempt at a delineation of the man.  To speak of the poet, since I write for Englishmen, would be very superfluous.  It may be readily imagined that the “tag-rag and bobtail” of the men who mainly constituted that very pleasant but not very intellectual society, were not likely to be such as Mr. Browning would readily make intimates of.  And I think I see in memory’s magic