FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 48:  Browning’s Essay on Shelley was reprinted by Dr Furnivall in “The Browning Society’s Papers,” 1881-84, Part I.]

[Footnote 49:  Letters of E.B.B. ii. 284.  On Milsand, the article “A French friend of Browning,” by Th.  Bentzon, is valuable and interesting.]

[Footnote 50:  Mrs Orr says that Browning always thought Mrs Carlyle “a hard and unlovable woman”; she adds, “I believe little liking was lost between them.”  Mrs Ritchie, in her “Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning” (pp. 250, 251), tells with spirit the story of Browning and Mrs Carlyle’s kettle, which, on being told to “put it down,” in an absent mood he planted upon her new carpet.  “Ye should have been more explicit,” said Carlyle to his wife.]

[Footnote 51:  See Letters of E.B.B. ii. 127.]

[Footnote 52:  Letters of E.B.B. ii. 99.]

[Footnote 53:  Letter of F. Tennyson, in Memoir of Alfred Tennyson, by his son, chapter xviii.]

[Footnote 54:  Mr Kenyon’s note, vol. ii. 142 of Letters of E.B.B.]

[Footnote 55:  Times Lit.  Supplement, Dec. 5, 1902.]

[Footnote 56:  Miss Cobbe’s testimony is similar, and Lehmann says that at Home’s name Browning would grow pale with passion.]

[Footnote 57:  See “Story and his Friends,” by Henry James, 1903, vol. i. pp. 284, 285.]

[Footnote 58:  Letters of E.B.B., ii. 345.]

[Footnote 59:  E.B.B. to Ruskin, Letters, ii. 199.]

[Footnote 60:  Which, however, did not prevent certain errors noted in a letter of Browning to Dante Rossetti.]

[Footnote 61:  Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  His “Family Letters,” i. 190, 191.]

[Footnote 62:  Letters of D.G.  Rossetti to William Allingham, 162.  See Mrs Browning’s letter to Mrs Tennyson in Memoir of Tennyson by his son, I vol. edition, p. 329.]

[Illustration:  PORTRAIT OF FILIPPO LIPPI.

By himself.  A detail from the fresco in the Cathedral at Praia from a photograph by ALINARI.]

Chapter IX

Men and Women

Rossetti expresses his first enthusiasm about Men and Women in a word when he calls the poems “my Elixir of Life.”  To Ruskin these, with other pieces which he now read for the first time, were as he declared in a rebellious mood, a mass of conundrums.  “He compelled me,” Rossetti adds, “to sit down before him and lay siege for one whole night; the result of which was that he sent me next morning a bulky letter to be forwarded to Browning, in which I trust he told him he was the greatest man since Shakespeare.”  The poems of the two new volumes were the gradual growth of a considerable number of years; since 1845 their author had published no group of short poems, and now, at the age of forty-three, he had attained the fulness of intellectual and imaginative power, varied experience of life and the artistic culture of Italy.  The Dramatis Personae of 1864 exhibits no decline from the high level reached in the volumes of 1855; but is there any later volume of miscellaneous poetry by Browning which, taken as a whole, approaches in excellence the collections of 1855 and 1864?