taken pains to conceal the impression. It is difficult, at all events,
to think of him as unsociable, and his talents certainly had their
amusing side. Miss Browning tells me that he made his schoolfellows
act plays, some of which he had written for them; and he delighted his
friends, not long ago, by mimicking his own solemn appearance on some
breaking-up or commemorative day, when, according to programme, 'Master
Browning' ascended a platform in the presence of assembled parents and
friends, and, in best jacket, white gloves, and carefully curled hair,
with a circular bow to the company and the then prescribed waving
of alternate arms, delivered a high-flown rhymed address of his own
composition.

* In spite of this ludicrous association Mr. Browning always
recognized great merit in Watts's hymns, and still more in
Dr. Watts himself, who had devoted to this comparatively
humble work intellectual powers competent to far higher
things.

** It was in no case literally true. William, afterwards
Sir William, Channel was leaving Mr. Ready when Browning
went to him; but a friendly acquaintance began, and was
afterwards continued, between the two boys; and a closer
friendship, formed with a younger brother Frank, was only
interrupted by his death. Another school friend or
acquaintance recalled himself as such to the poet's memory
some ten or twelve years ago. A man who has reached the age
at which his boyhood becomes of interest to the world may
even have survived many such relations.

And during the busy idleness of his schooldays, or, at all events, in
the holidays in which he rested from it, he was learning, as perhaps
only those do learn whose real education is derived from home. His
father's house was, Miss Browning tells me, literally crammed with
books; and, she adds, 'it was in this way that Robert became very early
familiar with subjects generally unknown to boys.' He read omnivorously,
though certainly not without guidance. One of the books he best and
earliest loved was 'Quarles' Emblemes', which his father possessed in
a seventeenth century edition, and which contains one or two very
tentative specimens of his early handwriting. Its quaint, powerful lines
and still quainter illustrations combined the marvellous with what he
believed to be true; and he seemed specially identified with its world
of religious fancies by the fact that t