Acquaintance quickly ripened into friendship, which was not the less genuine or cordial because Jowett had but a qualified esteem for Browning’s poems.  “Ought one to admire one’s friend’s poetry?” was a difficult question of casuistry which the Master of Balliol at one time proposed.  Much of Browning’s work appeared to him to be “extravagant, perverse, topsy-turvy”; “there is no rest in him,” Jowett wrote with special reference to the poems “Christmas Eve” and “Easter Day,” which he regarded as Browning’s noblest work.  But for the man his admiration was deep-based and substantial.  After Browning’s first visit to him in June 1865, Jowett wrote that though getting too old to make, as he supposed, new friends, he had—­he believed—­made one.  “It is impossible to speak without enthusiasm of Mr Browning’s open, generous nature and his great ability and knowledge.  I had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than any ordinary man.  His great energy is very remarkable, and his determination to make the most of the remainder of life.  Of personal objects he seems to have none except the education of his son."[95] Browning’s visits to Oxford and Cambridge did not cease when he dropped away from the round of visiting at country houses.  He writes with frank enjoyment of the almost interminable banquet given at Balliol in the Lent Term, 1877, on the occasion of the opening of the new Hall.  Oxford conferred upon him her D.C.L. in 1882, on which occasion a happy undergraduate jester sent fluttering towards the new Doctor’s head an appropriate allusion in the form of a red cotton night-cap.  The Cambridge LL.D. was conferred in 1879.  In 1871 he was elected a Life Governor of the University of London.  In 1868 he was invited to stand, with the certainty of election, for the Lord Rectorship of the University of St Andrews, as successor to John Stuart Mill, an honour which he declined.[96] The great event of this year in the history of his authorship was the publication in November and December of the first two volumes of The Ring and the Book.  The two remaining volumes followed in January and February 1869.

[Illustration:  PIAZZA DI SAN LORENZO, FLORENCE, WHERE “THE BOOK” WAS FOUND BY BROWNING.

From a photograph by ALINARI.]

In June 1860 Browning lighted, among the litter of odds and ends exposed for sale in the Piazza San Lorenzo, Florence, upon the “square old yellow book,” part print, part manuscript, which contained the crude fact from which his poem of the Franceschini murder case was developed.  The price was a lira, “eightpence English just.”  As he leaned by the fountain and walked through street and street, he read, and had mastered the contents before his foot was on the threshold of Casa Guidi[97].  That night his brain was a-work; pacing the terrace of Casa Guidi, while from Felice church opposite came