to be interested in England.  Browning was, like every other intelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews; but if he was related to every people in which he was interested, he must have been of extraordinarily mixed extraction.  Thirdly, there is the yet more sensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of the negro.  The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in reality to say, except that Browning’s grandmother was certainly a Creole.  It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularly dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian.  There does not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this, except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked exceedingly unlike a negro.

There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them, be true, but they are still irrelevant.  They are something that is in history or biography a great deal worse than being false—­they are misleading.  We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whether he had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whether the tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white or black:  we want to know something about his family, which is quite a different thing.  We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind of information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor.  We should not be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction, about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three generations.  This is the most practical duty of biography, and this is also the most difficult.  It is a great deal easier to hunt a family from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of all things—­social tone.

It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we looked for it.  But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic carefulness if he picks it up again.  It is true, assuredly, that all the three races above named could be connected with Browning’s personality.  If we believed, for instance, that he really came of a race of mediaeval barons, we should say at once that from them he got his pre-eminent spirit of battle:  we should be right, for every line in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theory about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a crowd.  Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point out how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism:  we should be right, for he was so absorbed.  Or again, in the case even of the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure