in Dorsetshire, and his stock apparently was west-country English. Browning himself liked to believe that an earlier ancestor was a certain Captain Micaiah Browning who raised the siege of Derry in 1689 by an act of personal bravery which cost him his life. It is most to the point that Browning was London born with two generations of city Londoners behind him. His mother was Sarah Anne--a name which became Sarianna in the poet's sister--Wiedemann, the Scottish daughter of a Hamburg German, a shipowner in Dundee. The characters of the poet's parents are clearly defined. Robert Browning, senior, was a man of business who performed his business duties punctiliously, and by frugality acquired a tolerably comfortable fortune, but he was not a money-making man; his real life was in his books and in the gratification of literary and æsthetic tastes. He was a voracious reader, and in a prudent way a book and print collector. "It was his habit," says Mrs. Orr, "when he bought a book--which was generally an old one allowing of this addition--to have some pages of blank paper bound into it. These he filled with notes, chronological tables, or such other supplementary matter as would enhance the interest, or assist the mastering, of its contents: all written in a clear and firm, though by no means formal, handwriting." He had a talent for versifying which he used for his entertainment; he had a cheerful nature and that genuine sociability which made him a delightful companion in the small circle which satisfied his simple, ingenuous nature. He was born and bred in the Church of England, but in middle life became by choice a Dissenter, though never an exclusive one. Mrs. Browning, the poet's mother, was once described by Carlyle as "the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman." She inherited from her father a love for music and drawing which in him was manifested in execution, in her in good taste and appreciation. She was a woman of serene, gentle and affectionate nature, and of simple, earnest religious belief. She was brought up in the kirk of Scotland, but, like her husband, connected herself in middle life with the Congregationalists. She communicated of her own religious conviction to her children; it is said that she handed down also a nervous organization. Of these parents Robert Browning was born in the parish of St. Giles, Camberwell, London, May 7, 1812. He was the oldest of the small family, having two sisters, one, Clara, who died in childhood, and Sarianna, two years younger than himself, who outlived him. The country in which he was born and where he spent his childhood has been delightfully described by his great contemporary, Ruskin, whose Herne Hill was in the immediate neighborhood. Camberwell at that time was a suburb of London, with rural spaces and near access to the open country, though the stony foot of the metropolis was already stepping outward upon the pleasant lanes and fields. There was room for gardening and the keeping of pets, while the country gave opportunity for forays into nature's fastnesses. The boy kept owls and monkeys, magpies and hedgehogs, an eagle, snakes even, and was touched with the collector's pride, as when he started a collection of rare creatures with a couple of lady-birds brought home one winter day and placed in a box lined with cotton wool and labelled, "Animals found surviving in the depths of a severe winter." It is easy for a reader of his poems to detect the close, sympathetic observation which he disclosed for all lower life. Indeed the characteristics...