important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such
knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child,
taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he
lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or
wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence,
when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no
reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game.
His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else,
left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world.

Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind
of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married
two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would
be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of
the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in _Fifine at the Fair_.
A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only
sister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her
also he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to
have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he
emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made
his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid.
Browning began to live in the life of his own age.

As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this
there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual
circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were
moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary
area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound
change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as
that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend
constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their
characters practically formed in a period long previous to their
appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan,
and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the
full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a sudden
and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create
the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his
first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that
Nap