s such
treasures was only matched by the generosity with which he parted with
them; and his daughter well remembers the feeling of angry suspicion
with which she and her brother noted the periodical arrival of a certain
visitor who would be closeted with their father for hours, and steal
away before the supper time, when the family would meet, with some
precious parcel of books or prints under his arm.

It is almost superfluous to say that he was indifferent to creature
comforts. Miss Browning was convinced that, if on any occasion she had
said to him, 'There will be no dinner to-day,' he would only have
looked up from his book to reply, 'All right, my dear, it is of no
consequence.' In his bank-clerk days, when he sometimes dined in Town,
he left one restaurant with which he was not otherwise dissatisfied,
because the waiter always gave him the trouble of specifying what he
would have to eat. A hundred times that trouble would not have deterred
him from a kindly act. Of his goodness of heart, indeed, many distinct
instances might be given; but even this scanty outline of his life has
rendered them superfluous.

Mr. Browning enjoyed splendid physical health. His early love of reading
had not precluded a wholesome enjoyment of athletic sports; and he was,
as a boy, the fastest runner and best base-ball player in his school. He
died, like his father, at eighty-four (or rather, within a few days of
eighty-five), but, unlike him, he had never been ill; a French friend
exclaimed when all was over, 'Il n'a jamais ete vieux.' His faculties
were so unclouded up to the last moment that he could watch himself
dying, and speculate on the nature of the change which was befalling
him. 'What do you think death is, Robert?' he said to his son; 'is it
a fainting, or is it a pang?' A notice of his decease appeared in an
American newspaper. It was written by an unknown hand, and bears a stamp
of genuineness which renders the greater part of it worth quoting.

'He was not only a ruddy, active man, with fine hair, that retained its
strength and brownness to the last, but he had a courageous spirit and a
remarkably intelligent mind. He was a man of the finest culture, and was
often, and never vainly, consulted by his son Robert concerning the more
recondite facts relating to the old characters, whose bones that poet
liked so well to disturb. His knowledge of old French, Spanish, and
Italian literature was wonderful. The old man went smi