to cloud his frank acceptance of life, as he found it come to him....  His unworldliness had not a flaw."[6] To Dante Rossetti he appeared, as an old man, “lovable beyond description,” with that “submissive yet highly cheerful simplicity of character which often ... appears in the family of a great man, who uses at last what the others have kept for him.”  He is, Rossetti continues, “a complete oddity—­with a real genius for drawing—­but caring for nothing in the least except Dutch boors,—­fancy, the father of Browning!—­and as innocent as a child.”  Browning himself declared that he had not one artistic taste in common with his father—­“in pictures, he goes ‘souls away’ to Brauwer, Ostade, Teniers ... he would turn from the Sistine Altar-piece to these—­in music he desiderates a tune ‘that has a story connected with it.’” Yet Browning inherited much from his father, and was ready to acknowledge his gains.  In Development, one of the poems of his last volume, he recalls his father’s sportive way of teaching him at five years old, with the aid of piled-up chairs and tables—­the cat for Helen, and Towzer and Tray as the Atreidai,—­the story of the siege of Troy, and, later, his urging the boy to read the tale “properly told” in the translation of Homer by his favourite poet, Pope.  He lived almost to the close of his eighty-fifth year, and if he was at times bewildered by his son’s poetry, he came nearer to it in intelligent sympathy as he grew older, and he had for long the satisfaction of enjoying his son’s fame.

The attachment of Robert Browning to his mother—­“the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman,” said Carlyle—­was deep and intimate.  For him she was, in his own phrase, “a divine woman”; her death in 1849 was to Browning almost an overwhelming blow.  She was of a nature finely and delicately strung.  Her nervous temperament seems to have been transmitted—­robust as he was in many ways—­to her son.  The love of music, which her Scottish-German father possessed in a high degree, leaping over a generation, reappeared in Robert Browning.  His capacity for intimate friendships with animals—­spider and toad and lizard—­was surely an inheritance from his mother.  Mr Stillman received from Browning’s sister an account of her mother’s unusual power over both wild creatures and household pets.  “She could lure the butterflies in the garden to her,” which reminds us of Browning’s whistling for lizards at Asolo.  A fierce bull-dog intractable to all others, to her was docile and obedient.  In her domestic ways she was gentle yet energetic.  Her piety was deep and pure.  Her husband had been in his earlier years a member of the Anglican communion; she was brought up in the Scottish kirk.  Before her marriage she became a member of the Independent congregation, meeting for worship at York Street, Lock’s Fields, Walworth, where now stands the Robert Browning Hall.  Her husband attached himself to the same congregation; both were teachers in the Sunday School.