greatest creative literary artist of the century, in prose at any rate, was leading an apparently somewhat indolent schoolboy life at Tours, undreamful yet of enormous debts, colossal undertakings, gigantic failures, and the Comedie Humaine. In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William Blake, Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen, Crome, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Constable, Sir David Wilkie, and Turner were in the exercise of their happiest faculties:  as were, in the usage of theirs, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Spohr, Donizetti, and Bellini.

It is not inadvisedly that I make this specification of great names, of men who were born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense contemporaries of Robert Browning.  There is no such thing as a fortuitous birth.  Creation does not occur spontaneously, as in that drawing of David Scott’s where from the footprint of the Omnipotent spring human spirits and fiery stars.  Literally indeed, as a great French writer has indicated, a man is the child of his time.  It is a matter often commented upon by students of literature, that great men do not appear at the beginning, but rather at the acme of a period.  They are not the flying scud of the coming wave, but the gleaming crown of that wave itself.  The epoch expends itself in preparation for these great ones.

If Nature’s first law were not a law of excess, the economy of life would have meagre results.  I think it is Turgeniev who speaks somewhere of her as a gigantic Titan, working in gloomy silence, with the same savage intentness upon a subtler twist of a flea’s joints as upon the Destinies of Man.

If there be a more foolish cry than that poetry is on the wane, it is that the great days had passed away even before Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson were born.  The way was prepared for Browning, as it was for Shakspere:  as it is, beyond doubt, for the next high peer of these.

There were ‘Roberts’ among the sons of the Browning family for at least four generations.  It has been affirmed, on disputable authority, that the surname is the English equivalent for Bruning, and that the family is of Teutonic origin.  Possibly:  but this origin is too remote to be of any practical concern.  Browning himself, it may be added, told Mr. Moncure Conway that the original name was De Bruni.  It is not a matter of much importance:  the poet was, personally and to a great extent in his genius, Anglo-Saxon.  Though there are plausible grounds for the assumption.  I can find nothing to substantiate the common assertion that, immediately, or remotely, his people were Jews.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Fairly conclusive evidence to the contrary, on the paternal side, is afforded in the fact that, in 1757, the poet’s great-grandfather gave one of his sons the baptismal name of Christian.  Dr. Furnivall’s latest researches prove that there is absolutely “no ground for supposing the presence of any Jewish blood in the poet’s veins.”]

As to Browning’s physiognomy and personal traits, this much may be granted:  if those who knew him were told he was a Jew they would not be much surprised.  In his exuberant vitality, in his sensuous love of music and the other arts, in his combined imaginativeness and shrewdness of common sense, in his superficial expansiveness and actual reticence, he would have been typical enough of the potent and artistic race for whom he has so often of late been claimed.