deep and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in 1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the University of St. Andrews.  He was much at the English universities, was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if he had ever been to a university.  The great universities would not let him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882.  When he received these honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly on his head as he passed under the gallery.  Some indignant intellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, but Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way.  “You are far too hard,” he wrote in answer, “on the very harmless drolleries of the young men.  Indeed, there used to be a regularly appointed jester, ‘Filius Terrae’ he was called, whose business it was to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that all human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied metal.”  In this there are other and deeper things characteristic of Browning besides his learning and humour.  In discussing anything, he must always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas.  Even in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals.  The young men themselves were probably unaware that they were the representatives of the “Filius Terrae.”

But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the years were passing over him.  On June 20, 1866, his father had died, a man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability mainly owe Browning.  In 1868 one of his closest friends, Arabella Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone with Browning.  Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time “a dream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting in five years,” that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and Arabella.  His friend Milsand, to whom Sordello was dedicated, died in 1886.  “I never knew,” said Browning, “or ever shall know, his like among men.”  But though both fame and a growing isolation indicated that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing continued in him with unconquerable energy—­there was no diminution in the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual output.