In 1881 the “Browning Society” was established.  It is easy to ridicule any institution of the kind—­much easier than to be considerate of other people’s earnest convictions and aims, or to be helpful to their object.  There is always a ridiculous side to excessive enthusiasm, particularly obvious to persons incapable of enthusiasm of any kind.  With some mistakes, and not a few more or less grotesque absurdities, the members of the various English and American Browning Societies are yet to be congratulated on the good work they have, collectively, accomplished.  Their publications are most interesting and suggestive:  ultimately they will be invaluable.  The members have also done a good work in causing some of Browning’s plays to be produced again on the stage, and in Miss Alma Murray and others have found sympathetic and able exponents of some of the poet’s most attractive dramatis personae.  There can be no question as to the powerful impetus given by the Society to Browning’s steadily-increasing popularity.  Nothing shows his judicious good sense more than the letter he wrote, privately, to Mr. Edmund Yates, at the time of the Society’s foundation.

“The Browning Society, I need not say, as well as Browning himself, are fair game for criticism.  I had no more to do with the founding it than the babe unborn; and, as Wilkes was no Wilkeite, I am quite other than a Browningite.  But I cannot wish harm to a society of, with a few exceptions, names unknown to me, who are busied about my books so disinterestedly.  The exaggerations probably come of the fifty-years’-long charge of unintelligibility against my books; such reactions are possible, though I never looked for the beginning of one so soon.  That there is a grotesque side to the thing is certain; but I have been surprised and touched by what cannot but have been well intentioned, I think.  Anyhow, as I never felt inconvenienced by hard words, you will not expect me to wax bumptious because of undue compliment:  so enough of ’Browning,’—­except that he is yours very truly, ’while this machine is to him.’”

The latter years of the poet were full of varied interest for himself, but present little of particular significance for specification in a monograph so concise as this must perforce be.  Every year he went abroad, to France or to Italy, and once or twice on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean.[25] At home—­for many years, at 19 Warwick Crescent, in what some one has called the dreary Mesopotamia of Paddington, and for the last three or four years of his life at 29 De Vere Gardens, Kensington Gore—­his avocations were so manifold that it is difficult to understand where he had leisure for his vocation.  Everybody wished him to come to dine; and he did his utmost to gratify Everybody.  He saw everything; read all the notable books; kept himself acquainted with the leading contents of the journals and magazines; conducted a large correspondence; read new French,