James calls the “member of society,” never the poet whose necktie is a dithyramb.  Good sense was his habit if not his foible.  And why should we deny ourselves here the pleasure of imagining Miss Browning at these pleasant ceremonies, as Mrs Bronson describes her, wearing “beautiful gowns of rich and sombre tints, and appearing each day in a different and most dainty French cap and quaint antique jewels”?  If other guests were not present, sometimes a visit to the theatre followed.  The Venetian comedies of Gallina especially pleased Browning; he went to his spacious box at the Goldoni evening after evening, and did not fail to express his thanks to his “brother dramatist” for the enjoyment he had received.  In his Toccata of Galuppi he had expressed the melancholy which underlies the transitory gaiety of eighteenth-century life in Venice; but he could also remember its innocent gladnesses without this sense of melancholy.  When in 1883 the committee of the Goldoni monument asked Browning to contribute a poem to their Album he immediately complied with the request.  It was “scribbled off,” according to Mrs Orr, while Professor Molmenti’s messenger was waiting; it was ready the day after the request reached him, says Mrs Bronson, and was probably “carefully thought out before he put pen to paper.”  It catches, in the happiest temper, the spirit of Goldoni’s sunniest plays: 

    There throng the People:  how they come and go,
     Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb—­see—­
    On Piazza, Calle, under Portico
     And over Bridge!  Dear King of Comedy,
    Be honoured!  Thou that didst love Venice so,
     Venice, and we who love her, all love thee!

The brightness and lightness of southern life soothed Browning’s northern strenuousness of mood.  He would enumerate of a morning the crimes of “the wicked city” as revealed by the reports of the public press—­a gondolier’s oars had been conveyed away, a piece of linen a-dry had corrupted the virtue of some lightfingered Autolycus of the canals![140] Yet all the while much of his heart remained with his native land.  He could not be happy without his London daily paper; Mrs Orr tells us how deeply interested he was in the fortunes of the British expedition for the relief of General Gordon.

In 1885 Browning’s son for the first time since his childhood was in Italy.  With Venice he was in his father’s phrase “simply infatuated.”  For his son’s sake, but also with the thought of a place of retreat when perhaps years should bring with them feebleness of body, Browning entered into treaty with the owner, an Austrian and an absentee, for the purchase of the Manzoni Palazzo on the Grand Canal.  He considered it the most beautiful house in Venice.  Ruskin had described it in the “Stones of Venice” as “a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine Renaissance.”  It wholly captured the imagination of Browning.  He not only already possessed it in his dream, but was busy