esiding on
his mother's sugar plantation at St. Kitt's, his appearance was held
to justify his being placed in church among the coloured members of the
congregation. We are assured in the strongest terms that the story has
no foundation, and this by a gentleman whose authority in all matters
concerning the Browning family Dr. Furnivall has otherwise accepted
as conclusive. If the anecdote were true it would be a singular
circumstance that Mr. Browning senior was always fond of drawing negro
heads, and thus obviously disclaimed any unpleasant association with
them.

I do not know the exact physical indications by which a dark strain is
perceived; but if they are to be sought in the colouring of eyes, hair,
and skin, they have been conspicuously absent in the two persons who in
the present case are supposed to have borne them. The poet's father had
light blue eyes and, I am assured by those who knew him best, a clear,
ruddy complexion. His appearance induced strangers passing him in the
Paris streets to remark, 'C'est un Anglais!' The absolute whiteness
of Miss Browning's skin was modified in her brother by a sallow tinge
sufficiently explained by frequent disturbance of the liver; but it
never affected the clearness of his large blue-grey eyes; and his hair,
which grew dark as he approached manhood, though it never became black,
is spoken of, by everyone who remembers him in childhood and youth,
as golden. It is no less worthy of note that the daughter of his early
friend Mr. Fox, who grew up in the little social circle to which he
belonged, never even heard of the dark cross now imputed to him; and a
lady who made his acquaintance during his twenty-fourth year, wrote a
sonnet upon him, beginning with these words:

Thy brow is calm, young Poet--pale and clear
As a moonlighted statue.

The suggestion of Italian characteristics in the Poet's face may serve,
however, to introduce a curious fact, which can have no bearing on the
main lines of his descent, but holds collateral possibilities concerning
it. His mother's name Wiedemann or Wiedeman appears in a merely
contracted form as that of one of the oldest families naturalized in
Venice. It became united by marriage with the Rezzonico; and, by a
strange coincidence, the last of these who occupied the palace now owned
by Mr. Barrett Browning was a Widman-Rezzonico. The present Contessa
Widman has lately restored her own palace, which was falling into ruin.

Th