Bank Stock Office, then an important
one, and which brought him into contact with the leading financiers
of the day. He became also a lieutenant in the Honourable Artillery
Company, and took part in the defence of the Bank in the Gordon Riots
of 1789. He was an able, energetic, and worldly man: an Englishman, very
much of the provincial type; his literary tastes being limited to the
Bible and 'Tom Jones', both of which he is said to have read through
once a year. He possessed a handsome person and, probably, a vigorous
constitution, since he lived to the age of eighty-four, though
frequently tormented by gout; a circumstance which may help to account
for his not having seen much of his grandchildren, the poet and his
sister; we are indeed told that he particularly dreaded the lively boy's
vicinity to his afflicted foot. He married, in 1778, Margaret, daughter
of a Mr. Tittle by his marriage with Miss Seymour; and who was born
in the West Indies and had inherited property there. They had three
children: Robert, the poet's father; a daughter, who lived an uneventful
life and plays no part in the family history; and another son who died
an infant. The Creole mother died also when her eldest boy was only
seven years old, and passed out of his memory in all but an indistinct
impression of having seen her lying in her coffin. Five years later the
widower married a Miss Smith, who gave him a large family.

This second marriage of Mr. Browning's was a critical event in the life
of his eldest son; it gave him, to all appearance, two step-parents
instead of one. There could have been little sympathy between his father
and himself, for no two persons were ever more unlike, but there was yet
another cause for the systematic unkindness under which the lad grew
up. Mr. Browning fell, as a hard man easily does, greatly under the
influence of his second wife, and this influence was made by her
to subserve the interests of a more than natural jealousy of her
predecessor. An early instance of this was her banishing the dead lady's
portrait to a garret, on the plea that her husband did not need two
wives. The son could be no burden upon her because he had a little
income, derived from his mother's brother; but this, probably, only
heightened her ill-will towards him. When he was old enough to go to a
University, and very desirous of going--when, moreover, he offered to
do so at his own cost--she induced his father to forbid it, because,