[Footnote 2:  “Letters of R.B. and E.B.B.,” ii. 477.]

[Footnote 3:  Letter of R.B. to E.B.B.]

[Footnote 4:  Dr Moncure Conway states that Browning told him that the original name of the family was De Buri.  According to Mrs Orr, Browning “neither claimed nor disclaimed the more remote genealogical past which had presented itself as a certainty to some older members of his family.”]

[Footnote 5:  Quoted by Mr Sharp in his “Life of Browning,” p. 21, n., from Mrs Fraser Cockran.]

[Footnote 6:  “Autobiography of a Journalist,” i. 277.]

[Footnote 7:  For my quotations and much of the above information I am indebted to Mr F. Herbert Stead, Warden of the Robert Browning Settlement, Walworth.  In Robert Browning Hall are preserved the baptismal registers of Robert (June 14th, 1812), and Sarah Anna Browning, with other documents from which I have quoted.]

[Footnote 8:  Letters of R.B. and E.B.B., i. 528, 529; and (for Ossian), ii. 469.]

[Footnote 9:  Browning in a letter to Mr Wise says that this happened “some time before 1830 (or even earlier).  The books,” he says, “were obtained in the regular way, from Hunt and Clarke.”  Mr Gosse in Personalia gives a different account, pp. 23, 24.]

[Footnote 10:  The quotations from letters above are taken from J.C.  Hadden’s article “Some Friends of Browning” in Macmillan’s Magazine, Jan. 1898.]

[Footnote 11:  Later in life Browning came to think unfavourably of Shelley as a man and to esteem him less highly as a poet.  He wrote in December 1885 to Dr Furnivall:  “For myself I painfully contrast my notions of Shelley the man and Shelley, well, even the poet, with what they were sixty years ago.”  He declined Dr Furnivall’s invitation to him to accept the presidency of “The Shelley Society.”]

[Footnote 12:  Even the publishers—­Saunders and Otley—­did not know the author’s name.—­“Letters of R.B. and E.B.B.,” i. 403.]

[Footnote 13:  “V.A. xx,” following the quotation from Cornelius Agrippa means “Vixi annos xx,” i.e. “the imaginary subject of the poem was of that age.”—­Browning to Mr T.J.  Wise.]

[Footnote 14:  Edmund Gosse:  “Robert Browning Personalia,” pp. 31, 32.  Mr W. M. Rossetti in “D.G.  Rossetti, his Family Letters,” i. 115, gives the summer of 1850 as the date of his brother’s letter; and says, no doubt correctly, that Browning was in Venice at the time.  Mr Sharp prints a letter of Browning’s on his early acquaintance with Rossetti, and on the incident recorded above.  I may here note that “Richmond,” appended, with a date, to Pauline, was a fancy or a blind; Browning never resided at Richmond.]

Chapter II

Paracelsus and Sordello

There is little of incident in Browning’s life to be recorded for the period between the publication of Pauline and the publication of Paracelsus.  During the winter of 1833-1834 he spent three months in Russia, “nominally,” says Mrs Orr, “in the character of secretary” to the Russian consul-general, Mr Benckhausen.  Memories of the endless pine-forests through which he was driven on the way to St Petersburg may have contributed long afterwards to descriptive passages of Ivan Ivanovitch.