nctively, with a result that was
unforeseen--much remains to prove his keen eye and his skill with the
pencil. Besides the curious books which he eagerly collected, he also
gathered together many prints--those of Hogarth especially, and in early
states. He had a singular interest, such as may also be seen in the
author of _The Ring and the Book_, in investigating and elucidating
complex criminal cases.[5] He was a lover of athletic sports and never
knew ill-health. For the accumulation of riches he had no talent and no
desire, but he had a simple wealth of affection which he bestowed
generously on his children and his friends. "My father," wrote Browning,
"is tender-hearted to a fault.... To all women and children he is
chivalrous." "He had," writes Mr W.J. Stillman, who knew Browning's
father in Paris in his elder years, "the perpetual juvenility of a
blessed child. If to live in the world as if not of it indicates a
saintly nature, then Robert Browning the elder was a saint; a serene,
untroubled soul, conscious of no moral or theological problem to disturb
his serenity, and as gentle as a gentle woman; a man in whom, it seemed
to me, no moral conflict could ever have arisen to cloud his frank
acceptance of life, as he found it come to him.... His unworldliness had
not a flaw."[6] To Dante Rossetti he appeared, as an old man, "lovable
beyond description," with that "submissive yet highly cheerful
simplicity of character which often ... appears in the family of a great
man, who uses at last what the others have kept for him." He is,
Rossetti continues, "a complete oddity--with a real genius for
drawing--but caring for nothing in the least except Dutch boors,--fancy,
the father of Browning!--and as innocent as a child." Browning himself
declared that he had not one artistic taste in common with his
father--"in pictures, he goes 'souls away' to Brauwer, Ostade, Teniers
... he would turn from the Sistine Altar-piece to these--in music he
desiderates a tune 'that has a story connected with it.'" Yet Browning
inherited much from his father, and was ready to acknowledge his gains.
In _Development_, one of the poems of his last volume, he recalls his
father's sportive way of teaching him at five years old, with the aid of
piled-up chairs and tables--the cat for Helen, and Towzer and Tray as
the Atreidai,--the story of the siege of Troy, and, later, his urging
the boy to read the tale "properly told" in the translation of Homer b