Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally apparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a very vivid little sketch.  She describes how Browning called at the house (he was acquainted with her father), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abrupt politeness if he might play on the piano.  This touch is very characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning’s social manner.  “He was then,” she writes, “slim and dark, and very handsome, and—­may I hint it?—­just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion and the mould of form.  But full of ‘ambition,’ eager for success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success.”  That is as good a portrait as we can have of the Browning of these days—­quite self-satisfied, but not self-conscious young man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravans and listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescent vitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immersed itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame.  But a man still above all things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising foppery which defies them.  Just as he walked in coolly and yet impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of European literature and offered to sing.

CHAPTER II

EARLY WORKS

In 1840 Sordello was published.  Its reception by the great majority of readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was a reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history, a reception that was neither praise nor blame.  It was perhaps best expressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had read Sordello with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello was a man, or a city, or a book.  Better known, of course, is the story of Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem—­

    “Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told,”

and the last line—­

    “Who would, has heard Sordello’s story told,”

were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were lies.

Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold.  He was recovering from an illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed and began Sordello.  No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly pale, put down the book, and said, “My God!  I’m an idiot.  My health is restored, but my mind’s