“When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,”

as he says in The Ring and the Book.  We should be right; for there really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid our cold English poets, seems scarcely European.  All this is extremely fascinating; and it may be true.  But, as has above been suggested, here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble temptation to see too much in everything.  The biographer can easily see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities.  But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any three other nationalities?  If Browning’s ancestors had been Frenchmen, should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that he inherited that logical agility which marks him among English poets?  If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable travel?  If his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not have said that only in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the Browning fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism?  This over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret hero-worship which is the heart of biography.  The lover of great men sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the storms and the falling stars.

A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr. Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the beginning of the world.  For his last discovery, the descent of Browning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence.  But Browning’s descent from barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the main point touching his family.  If the Brownings were of mixed origin, they were so much the more like the great majority of English middle-class people.  It is curious that the romance of race should be spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest in one not very interesting type of rank and family.  The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other people in the world.  For since it is their principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals.  It is in the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash