Robert Browning sprang from a line of clerks and small merchants; but as indemnity for the lack of a family ’scutcheon, we are told that his uncle, Reuben Browning, was a sure-enough poet.  For once in an idle hour he threw off a little thing for an inscription to be placed on a presentation ink-bottle, and Disraeli seeing it, declared, “Nothing like this has ever before been written!”

Beyond doubt, Disraeli made the statement—­it bears his earmark.  It will be remembered that the Earl of Beaconsfield had a stock form for acknowledging receipt of the many books sent to him by aspiring authors.  It ran something like this:  “The Earl of Beaconsfield begs to thank the gifted author of——­for a copy of his book, and gives the hearty assurance that he will waste no time in reading the volume.”

And further, the fact is set forth with unction that Robert Browning was entrusted with a latchkey early in life, and that he always gave his mother a good-night kiss.  He gave her the good-night kiss willy-nilly.  If she had retired when he came home, he used the trusty latchkey and went to her room to imprint on her lips the good-night kiss.  He did this, the biographer would have us believe, to convince the good mother that his breath was what it should be; and he awakened her so she would know the hour was seasonable.

In many manufactories there is an electric apparatus wherewith every employee registers when he arrives, by turning a key or pushing a button.  Robert Browning always fearlessly registered as soon as he got home—­this according to Mrs. Orr.

Unfortunately, or otherwise, there is a little scattered information which makes us believe that Robert Browning’s mother was not so fearful of her son’s conduct, nor suspicious as to his breath, as to lie awake nights and keep tab on his hours.  The world has never denied that Robert Browning was entrusted with a latchkey, and it cares little if occasionally, early in life, he fumbled for the keyhole.  And my conception of his character is such that, when in the few instances Aurora, rosy goddess of the morn, marked his homecoming with chrome-red in the eastern sky, he did not search the sleeping-rooms for his mother to apprise her of the hour.

In one place Mrs. Orr avers, in a voice hushed with emotion, that Browning carefully read all of Johnson’s Dictionary “as a fit preparation for a literary career.”  Without any attempt to deny that the perusal of a dictionary is “fit preparation for a literary career,” I yet fear me that the learned biographer, in a warm anxiety to prove the man exceeding studious and very virtuous, has tipped a bit to t’ other side.

She has apotheosized her subject—­and in an attempt to portray him as a peculiar person, set apart, has well-nigh given us a being without hands, feet, eyes, ears, organs, dimensions, passions.

But after a careful study of the data, various visits to the places where he lived in England, trips to Casa Guidi, views from Casa Guidi windows, a journey to Palazzo Rezzonico at Venice, where he died, and many a pious pilgrimage to Poets’ Corner, in Westminster Abbey, where he sleeps, I am constrained to believe that Robert Browning was made from the same kind of clay as the rest of us.  He was human—­he was splendidly human.