g his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin,
they were so much the more like the great majority of English
middle-class people. It is curious that the romance of race should be
spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that
admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest
in one not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is that
aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other
people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only
within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in
their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they
exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in
the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the
suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of
Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a
crime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the
Browning family have every abstract possibility. But it is a far more
cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of
every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found
similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell
that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations
back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwell
family. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be
better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story,
Kingsley's _Water Babies_, in which the pedigree of the Professor is
treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common
sense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she
was born at Curacoa (of course, you have read your geography and
therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was
brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern
politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough
an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods."

It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear
account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much
more important, a clear account of his home. For the great central
and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to
veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman
of the middle class. He may have h