s, for London lodgings, was not exhilarating; but
after a week in Paris they found themselves in an apartment in No. 13
Dorset Street, Manchester Square, where they remained until October, every
hour filled with engagements or work. Proof-sheets were coming in at all
hours; likewise friends, with the usual contingent of the "devastators of
a day," and all that fatigue and interruption and turmoil that lies in
wait for the pilgrim returning to his former home, beset and entangled
them. Mrs. Browning's youngest brother, Alfred Barrett, was married that
summer to his cousin Lizzie, the "pretty cousin" to whom allusion has
already been made as the original of Mrs. Browning's poem, "A Portrait."
They were married in Paris at the English Embassy, and passed the summer
on the Continent. Mrs. Browning's sister Henrietta (Mrs. Surtees Cook) was
unable to come up to London, so that the hoped-for pleasure of seeing this
brother and sister was denied her; but Miss Arabel Barrett was close at
hand in the Wimpole Street home, and the sisters were much together. Mr.
Barrett had never changed his mental attitude regarding the marriage of
his daughter Elizabeth, nor that of any of his children, and while this
was a constant and never-forgotten grief with Mrs. Browning, there seems
no necessity for prolonged allusion to it. The matter can only be
relegated to the realms of non-comprehension as the idiosyncrasy of an
otherwise good man, of intelligence and much nobility of nature.

The Brownings were invited to Knebworth, to visit Lord Lytton, but they
were unable to avail themselves of the pleasure because of proof-sheets
and contingent demands which only writers with books in press can
understand. Proof-sheets are unquestionably endowed with some super-human
power of volition, and invariably arrive at the psychological moment when,
if their author were being married or buried, the ceremony would have to
be postponed until they were corrected. But the poets were not without
pleasant interludes, either; as when Tennyson came from the Isle of Wight
to London for three or four days, two of which he passed with the
Brownings. He "dined, smoked, and opened his heart" to them; and concluded
this memorable visit at the witching hour of half-past two in the morning,
after reading "Maud" aloud the evening before from the proof-sheets. The
date of this event is established by an inscription affixed to the back of
a pen-and-ink sketch of Tennyson, ma