Of Wordsworth Browning saw not a little in the ensuing few years, for on the rare visits the elderly poet paid to London, Talfourd never failed to ask the author of “Paracelsus,” for whom he had a sincere admiration, to meet the great man.  It was not in the nature of things that the two poets could become friends, but though the younger was sometimes annoyed by the elder’s pooh-poohing his republican sympathies, and contemptuously waiving aside as a mere nobody no less an individual than Shelley, he never failed of respect and even reverence.  With what tenderness and dignity he has commemorated the great poet’s falling away from his early ideals, may be seen in “The Lost Leader,” one of the most popular of Browning’s short poems, and likely to remain so.  For several reasons, however, it is best as well as right that Wordsworth should not be more than merely nominally identified with the Lost Leader.  Browning was always imperative upon this point.

Towards Landor, on the other hand, he entertained a sentiment of genuine affection, coupled with a profound sympathy and admiration:  a sentiment duly reciprocated.  The care of the younger for the elder, in the old age of the latter, is one of the most beautiful incidents in a beautiful life.

But the evening was not to pass without another memorable incident, one to which we owe “Strafford,” and probably “A Blot on the ’Scutcheon.”  Just as the young poet, flushed with the triumphant pleasure of the evening, was about to leave, Macready arrested him by a friendly grip of the arm.  In unmistakable earnestness he asked Browning to write him a play.  With a simplicity equal to the occasion, the poet contented himself with replying, “Shall it be historical and English?  What do you say to a drama on Strafford?”

Macready was pleased with the idea, and hopeful that his friend would be more successful with the English statesman than with the eunuch Narses.

A few months elapsed before the poet, who had set aside the long work upon which he was engaged ("Sordello"), called upon Macready with the manuscript of “Strafford.”  The latter hoped much from it.  In March the MS. was ready.  About the end of the month Macready took it to Covent Garden Theatre, and read it to Mr. Osbaldiston, “who caught at it with avidity, and agreed to produce it without delay.”

It was an eventful first of May—­an eventful twelvemonth, indeed, for it was the initial year of the Victorian era, notable, too, as that wherein the Electric Telegraph was established, and, in letters, wherein a new dramatic literature had its origin.  For “Strafford,” already significant of a novel movement, and destined, it seems to me, to be still more significant in that great dramatic period towards which we are fast converging, was not less important to the Drama in England, as a new departure in method and radically indicative of a fresh standpoint, than “Hernani” was in France.  But in literary history the day itself is doubly memorable,