of text made in the edition of his wife’s Poems of the following year; and for a time his own Christmas Eve and Easter Day was an absorbing occupation.  As to the “reading,” the chief disadvantage of Florence towards the middle of the last century was the difficulty of seeing new books of interest, whether French or English.  Yet Vanity Fair and The Princess, Jane Eyre and Modern Painters somehow found their way to Casa Guidi.[44]

Casa Guidi proper, the Casa Guidi which held the books and pictures and furniture and graceful knick-knacks chosen by its occupants, who were lovers of beauty, dates only from 1848.  Previously they had been satisfied with a furnished apartment.  Not long before the unfurnished rooms were hired, a mistake in choosing rooms which suffered from the absence of sunshine and warmth gave Browning an opportunity of displaying what to his wife’s eyes appeared to be unexampled magnanimity.  The six months’ rent was promptly paid, and chambers on the Pitti “yellow with sunshine from morning to evening” were secured.  “Any other man, a little lower than the angels,” his wife assured Miss Mitford, “would have stamped and sworn a little for the mere relief of the thing, but as to his being angry with me for any cause, except not eating enough dinner, the sun would turn the wrong way first.”  It seemed an excellent piece of economy to take the spacious suite of unfurnished rooms in the Via Maggio, now distinguished by the inscription known to all visitors to Florence, which were to be had for twenty-five guineas a year, and which, when furnished, might be let during any prolonged absence for a considerable sum.  The temptation of a ground-floor in the Frescobaldi Palace, and a garden bright with camellias, to which Browning for a time inclined, was rejected.  At Casa Guidi the double terrace where orange-trees and camellias also might find a place made amends for the garden with its threatening cloud of mosquitoes, “worse than Austrians”; every need of space and height, of warmth and coolness seemed to be met; and it only remained to expend the welcome proceeds of the sale of books in the recreation of gathering together “rococo chairs, spring sofas, carved bookcases, satin from cardinals’ beds and the rest.”  Before long Browning amused himself in picking up for a few pauls this or that picture, on seeing which an accomplished connoisseur, like Kirkup, would even hazard the name of Cimabue or Ghirlandaio, or if not that of Giotto, then the safer adjective Giottesque.

Although living the life of retirement which his wife’s uncertain state of health required, Browning gradually obtained the acquaintance of several interesting persons, of whom Kirkup, who has just been mentioned, was one.  “As to Italian society,” wrote Mrs Browning, “one may as well take to longing for the evening star, for it seems quite inaccessible.”  But the name of Elizabeth Barrett, if not yet that