List of Illustrations

Robert Browning, from a portrait in oil, for which he sat to R.W.  Curtis at Venice, 1880, reproduced by kind permission of D.S.  Curtis, Esq. (photogravure)

Main street of Asolo, showing Browning’s house, from a drawing by Miss D. Noyes

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from a drawing in chalk by Field Talfourd in the National Portrait Gallery

Robert Browning, from an engraving by J.G.  Armytage

THE VIA BOCCA DI LEONE, ROME, IN WHICH THE BROWNINGS STAYED, a photograph

PORTRAIT OF FILIPPO LIPPI, BY HIMSELF, a detail from the fresco in the Cathedral at Prato, from a photograph by Alinari

ANDREA DEL SARTO, from a print after the portrait by himself in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence

PIAZZA DI SAN LORENZO, FLORENCE, WHERE “THE BOOK” WAS FOUND BY BROWNING, from a photograph by Alinari

THE PALAZZO GIUSTINIANI, VENICE, from a drawing by Miss N. Erichsen

SPECIMEN OF BROWNING’S HANDWRITING, from a letter to D.S.  Curtis, Esq.

ROBERT BROWNING, from a photograph (photogravure)

THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, VENICE, from a drawing by Miss Katherine
Kimball

Chapter I

Childhood and Youth

The ancestry of Robert Browning has been traced[1] to an earlier Robert who lived in the service of Sir John Bankes of Corfe Castle, and died in 1746.  His eldest son, Thomas, “was granted a lease for three lives of the little inn, in the little hamlet of East Woodyates and parish of Pentridge, nine miles south-west of Salisbury on the road to Exeter.”  Robert, born in 1749, the son of this Thomas, and grandfather of the poet, became a clerk in the Bank of England, and rose to be principal in the Bank Stock Office.  At the age of twenty-nine he married Margaret Tittle, a lady born in the West Indies and possessed of West Indian property.  He is described by Mrs Orr as an able, energetic, and worldly man.  He lived until his grandson was twenty-one years old.  His first wife was the mother of another Robert, the poet’s father, born in 1781.  When the boy had reached the age of seven he lost his mother, and five years later his father married again.  This younger Robert when a youth desired to become an artist, but such a career was denied to him.  He longed for a University education, and, through the influence of his stepmother, this also was refused.  They shipped the young man to St Kitts, purposing that he should oversee the West Indian estate.  There, as Browning on the authority of his mother told Miss Barrett, “he conceived such a hatred to the slave-system ... that he relinquished every prospect, supported himself