for the interest in his writings demonstrated by persons many of whom had been unknown to him even by name.  He was always ready to furnish Dr Furnivall with a note of facts or elucidation.  His old admirers had made him somewhat too much of a peculiar and private possession.  A propaganda of younger believers could not be unwelcome to one who had for so many years been commonly regarded as an obscure heretic—­not even an heresiarch—­of literature.

Other honours accompanied his old age.  In 1884 he received the LL.D. of the University of Edinburgh, and again declined to be nominated for the Lord Rectorship of the University of St Andrews.  Next year he accepted the Honorary Presidency of the Five Associated Societies of Edinburgh.  In 1886 he was appointed Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, a sinecure post rendered vacant by the death of Lord Houghton.  Though so vigorous in talk, Browning could not make a public speech, or he shrank from such an effort; none of the honours which he accepted were such as to put him to this test.  During many years he was President of the New Shakspere Society.  His veneration for Shakespeare is expressed in a sonnet entitled The Names, written for the Book of the Show held in the Albert Hall, May 1884, on behalf of the Fulham Road Hospital for Women; it was not included in the edition of his works which he was superintending during the last two years of his life.  Browning was not wholly uninterested in the attempts made to transfer the glory of the Shakespearian drama to Bacon; he agreed with Spedding that whatever else might be a matter of doubt, it was certain that the author of the “Essays” could not have been the author of the plays.  On another question it is perhaps worth recording his opinion—­he could see nothing of Shakespeare, he declared, in the tragedy of Titus Andronicus.

In 1879 appeared Dramatic Idyls and in the following year Dramatic Idyls, Second Series.  They differed in two respects from the volumes of miscellaneous poetry which Browning had previously published.  Hitherto the contents of his collections of verse in the main fell into three groups—­poems which were interpretations of the passion of love, poems which dealt with art and artists, poems which were inspired by the ideas and emotions of religion.  Unless we regard Ned Bratts as a poem of religious experience, we may say that these themes are wholly absent from the Dramatic Idyls.  Secondly, the short story in verse for the first time becomes predominant, or rather excludes other forms, and the short story here is in general not romantic or fantastic, but what we understand by the word “realistic.”  The outward body of the story is in several instances more built up by cumulative details than formerly, which gives it an air of solidity or massiveness, and is less expressed through a swift selection of things essential.  And this may lead a reader to suppose that the story is more a narrative of external incidents