nger in London, the elder abroad. All three became efficient
financial clerks, and attained to good positions and fair means.[3] The
eldest, Robert, was a man of exceptional powers. He was a poet, both in
sentiment and expression; and he understood, as well as enjoyed, the
excellent in art. He was a scholar, too, in a reputable fashion: not
indifferent to what he had learnt in his youth, nor heedless of the high
opinion generally entertained for the greatest writers of antiquity, but
with a particular care himself for Horace and Anacreon. As his son once
told a friend. "The old gentleman's brain was a storehouse of literary
and philosophical antiquities. He was completely versed in mediaeval
legend, and seemed to have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic
personages, personally"--a significant detail, by the way. He was fond
of metrical composition, and his ease and grace in the use of the heroic
couplet were the admiration, not only of his intellectual associates,
but, in later days, of his son, who was wont to affirm, certainly in all
seriousness, that expressionally his father was a finer poetic artist
than himself. Some one has recorded of him that he was an authority on
the Letters of Junius: fortunately he had more tangible claims than this
to the esteem of his fellows. It was his boast that, notwithstanding the
exigencies of his vocation, he knew as much of the history of art as any
professional critic. His extreme modesty is deducible from this naive
remark. He was an amateur artist, moreover, as well as poet, critic,
and student. I have seen several of his drawings which are
praise-worthy: his studies in portraiture, particularly, are ably
touched: and, as is well known, he had an active faculty of pictorial
caricature. In the intervals of leisure which beset the best regulated
clerk he was addicted to making drawings of the habitual visitors to the
Bank of England, in which he had obtained a post on his return, in 1803,
from the West Indies, and in the enjoyment of which he remained till
1853, when he retired on a small pension. His son had an independent
income, but whether from a bequest, or in the form of an allowance from
his then unmarried Uncle Reuben, is uncertain. In the first year of his
marriage Mr. Browning resided in an old house in Southampton Street,
Peckham, and there the poet was born. The house was long ago pulled
down, and another built on its site. Mr. Browning afterwards removed to
ano