even when he was unfortunate in every other literary quality.  Apart altogether from every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich as his ever carried its treasures to the grave.  All these later poems are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded.  They are thoroughly characteristic of their author.  But nothing in them is quite so characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things in the world, to re-write and improve “Pauline,” the boyish poem that he had written fifty-five years before.  Here was a man covered with glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty years in the blaze of successive victories.  It is such things as these which give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyond the more interest of genius.  It was of such things that Elizabeth Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight—­that his genius was the least important thing about him.

During all these later years, Browning’s life had been a quiet and regular one.  He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the same time.  He had by this time become far more of a public figure than he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy.  In 1881, Dr. Furnivall and Miss E.H.  Hickey founded the famous “Browning Society.”  He became President of the new “Shakespeare Society” and of the “Wordsworth Society.”  In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy.  When he moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that he was slowly breaking up.  He still dined out constantly; he still attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity and embarrassment.  In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style, he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole literary career:  “I myself found many forgotten fields which have proved the richest of pastures.”  But despite his continued energy, his health was gradually growing worse.  He was a strong man in a muscular, and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense a nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement prolonged through a lifetime.  In these closing years he began to feel more constantly the necessity for rest.  He and his sister went to live at a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking and drinking tea