among his dramas, and A Soul’s Tragedy.[23] His sister, except in the instance of Colombe, was Browning’s amanuensis.  On each title-page he is named Robert Browning “Author of Paracelsus”—­the “wholly unintelligible” Sordello being passed over.  Talfourd, “Barry Cornwall,” and John Kenyon (the cousin of Elizabeth Barrett) were honoured with dedications.  In these pamphlets of Moxon, Browning’s wonderful apples of gold were certainly not presented to the public in pictures or baskets of silver; yet the possessor of the eight parts in their yellow paper wrappers may now be congratulated.  Only one of the numbers—­A Blot in the ’Scutcheon—­attained the distinction of a second edition, and this probably because the drama as published was helped to a comparative popularity by its representation on the stage.

This tragedy of young love and death was written hastily—­in four or five days—­for Macready.  Browning while at work on his play, as we learn from a letter of Dante Rossetti to Allingham, was kept indoors by a slight indisposition; his father on going to see him “was each day received boisterously and cheerfully with the words:  ’I have done another act, father.’"[24] Forster read the tragedy aloud from the manuscript for Dickens, who wrote of it with unmeasured enthusiasm in a letter, known to Browning only when printed after the lapse of some thirty years:  “Browning’s play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow....  I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception like it.”  Things had gone ill with Macready at Drury Lane, and when the time for A Blot in the ’Scutcheon drew near it is evident that he feared further losses and would gladly have been released from his promise to produce the play; but Browning failed to divine the true state of affairs.  The tragedy was read to the company by a grotesque, wooden-legged and red-nosed prompter, and it was greeted with laughter.  To make amends, Macready himself undertook to read it aloud, but he declared himself unable, in the disturbed state of his mind, to appear before the public:  his part—­that of Lord Tresham—­must be taken by Phelps.  From certain rehearsals Phelps was unavoidably absent through illness.  Macready who read his lines on these occasions, now was caught by the play, and saw possibilities in the part of Tresham which fired his imagination.  He chose, almost at the last moment, to displace his younger and less distinguished colleague.  Browning, on the other hand, insisted that Phelps, having been assigned the part, should retain it.  To baffle Macready in his design of presenting the play to the public in a mutilated form, Browning, aided by his publisher, had the whole printed in four-and-twenty hours.[25] A rupture of the long-standing friendship with Macready followed, nor did author and actor meet again until after the great sorrow of Browning’s life.  “Mr Macready too”—­writes Mrs Orr—­“had recently lost his wife, and Mr Browning could only start forward, grasp the hand of his old friend, and in a voice choked with emotion say, ‘O Macready!’”