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Browning’s father was a bank-clerk; and Robert Browning, the Third, author of “Paracelsus,” could have secured his father’s place in the Bank of England, if he had had ambitions.  And the fact that he had not was a source of silent sorrow to the father, even to the day of his death, in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-six.

Robert Browning, the grandfather, entered the Bank as an errand-boy, and rose by slow stages to Principal of the Stock-Room.  He served the Bank full half a century, and saved from his salary a goodly competence.  This money, tightly and rightly invested, passed to his son.  The son never secured the complete favor of his employers that the father had known, but he added to his weekly stipend by what a writer terms, “legitimate perquisites.”  This, being literally interpreted, means that he purchased paper, pens and sealing-wax for the use of the Bank, and charged the goods in at his own price, doubtless with the consent of his superior, with whom he divided profits.  He could have parodied the remark of Fletcher of Saltoun and said, “Let me supply the perquisite-requisites and I care not who makes the laws.”  So he grew rich—­moderately rich—­and lived simply and comfortably up at Camberwell, with only one besetting dissipation:  he was a book-collector and had learned more Greek than Robert the Third was to acquire.  He searched bookstalls on the way to the City in the morning, and lay in wait for First Editions on the way home at night.  When he had a holiday, he went in search of a book.  He sneaked books into the house, and declared to his admonishing wife the next week that he had always owned ’em, or that they were presented to him.  The funds his father had left him, his salary and “the perquisites,” made a goodly income, but he always complained of poverty.  He was secretly hoarding sums so as to secure certain books.

The shelves grew until they reached the ceiling, and then bookcases invaded the dining-room.  The collector didn’t trust his wife with the household purchasing; no bank-clerk ever does—­and all the pennies were needed for books.  The good wife, having nothing else to do, grew anemic, had neuralgia and lapsed into a Shut-in, wearing a pale-blue wrapper and reclining on a couch, around which were piled—­mountain-high—­books.

The pale invalid used to imagine that the great cases were swaying and dancing a minuet, and she fully expected the tomes would all come a-toppling down and smother her—­and she didn’t care much if they would; but they never did.  She was the mother of two children—­the boy Robert, born the year after her marriage; and in a little over another year a daughter came, and this closed the family record.

The invalid mother was a woman of fine feeling and much poetic insight.  She didn’t talk as much about books as her husband did, but I think she knew the good ones better.  The mother and son moused in books together, and Mrs. Orr is surely right in her suggestion that this love of mother and son took upon itself the nature of a passion.