his death-bed, and he expressed his pleasure at the news. Shortly after his death memorial tablets were affixed by the city of Venice to the outer wall of the Palazzo Rezzonico, and by the Society of Arts to that of 19 Warwick Crescent. He left behind him his sister, Miss Sarianna Browning, and his son, Mr. Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, who are now resident at Venice and Asolo. Browning's rank in the literature of the nineteenth century has been the subject of endless disputation. It can be discussed here only from the point of view of the illustration of his writings by his person and character. As a contributor to thought, it is noticeable in the first place that Browning was almost alone in his generation in preaching a persistent optimism. In the latest of his published poems, in the 'Epilogue' to 'Asolando,' he sums up and states with unflinching clearness his attitude towards life. He desires to be remembered as One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Sleep to wake. No poet ever comprehended his own character better, or comprised the expression of it in better language. This note of militant optimism was the ruling one in Browning's character, and nothing that he wrote or said or did in his long career ever belied it. This optimism was not discouraged by the results of an impassioned curiosity as to the conditions and movements of the soul in other people. He was, as a writer, largely a psychological monologuist that is to say, he loved to enter into the nature of persons widely different from himself, and push his study, or construction, of their experiences to the furthest limit of exploration. In these adventures he constantly met with evidences of baseness, frailty, and inconsistency; but his tolerance was apostolic, and the only thing which ever disturbed his moral equanimity was the evidences of selfishness. He could forgive anything but cruelty. His optimism accompanied his curiosity on these adventures into the souls of others, and prevented him from falling into cynicism or indignation. He kept his temper and was a benevolent observer. This characteristic in his writings was noted in his life as well. Although Browning was so sublime a metaphysical poet, nothing delighted him more than to listen to an accumulation of trifling (if exact) circumstances which helped to build up the life of a human being. Every man and woman whom he met was to Browning a poem in solution; some chemical condition might at any moment resolve any one of the multitude into a crystal. His optimism, his curiosity, and his clairvoyance occupied his thoughts in a remarkably objective way. He was of all poets the one least self-centred, and therefore in all probability the happiest. His physical conditions were in harmony with his spiritual characteristics. He was robust, active, loud in speech, cordial in manner, gracious and conciliatory in address, but subject to sudden fits of indignation which were like thunderstorms. In all these respects it seems probable that his character altered very little as the years went on. What he was as a boy, in these respects, it is believed that he continued to be as an old man. 'He missed the morbid overrefinement of the age; the processes of his mind were sometimes even a little coarse, and always delightfully direct. For real delicacy he had full appreciation, but he was brutally scornful of all exquisite morbidness. The vibration of his loud voice, his hard fist upon the table, would make very short work with cobwebs. But this external roughness, like the rind of a fruit, merely served to keep the inner sensibilities young and fresh. None of his instincts grew old. Long as he lived, he did not live long enough for one of his ideals to vanish, for one of his enthusiasms to lose its heat. The subtlest of writers, he was the singlest of men, and he learned in serenity what he taught in song.' The question of the 'obscurity' of his style has been mooted too often and emphasised too much by Browning's friends and enemies alike, to be passed over in silence here. But here, at the same time, it is impossible to deal with it exhaustively. Something may, however, be said in admission and in defence. We must admit that Browning is often harsh, hard, crabbed, and nodulous to the last degree; he suppressed too many of the smaller parts of speech in his desire to produce a concise and rapid impression. He twisted words out of their fit construction, he clothed extremely subtle ideas in language which sometimes made them appear not merely difficult but impossible of comprehension. Odd as it sounds to say so, these faults seem to have been the result of too facile a mode of composition. Perhaps no poet of equal importance has written so fluently and corrected so little as Browning did. On the other hand, in defence, it must be said that it is always, or nearly always, possible to penetrate Browning's obscurity, and to find excellent thought hidden in the cloud, and that time and familiarity have already made a great deal perfectly translucent which at one time seemed impenetrable even to the most respectful and intelligent reader. In person Browning was below the middle height, but broadly built and of great muscular strength, which he retained through life in spite of his indifference to all athletic exercises. His hair was dark brown, and in early life exceedingly full and lustrous; in middle life it faded, and in old age turned white, remaining copious to the last. The earliest known portrait of Browning is that engraved for Horne's 'New Spirit of the Age' in 1844, when he was about thirty-two. In 1854 a highly finished pencil drawing of him was made in Rome by Frederic Leighton, but this appears to be lost. In 1855, or a little later, Browning was painted by Gordigiani, and in 1856 Woolner executed a bronze medallion of him. In 1859 Mr. and Mrs. Browning sat to Field Talfourd in Florence for life-sized crayon portraits, of which that of Elizabeth is now in the National Portrait Gallery, where that of Robert, long in the possession of the present writer, joined it in July 1900. Of this portrait Browning wrote long afterwards (23 Feb. 1888), 'My sister - a better authority than myself — has always liked it, as resembling its subject when his features had more resemblance to those of his mother than in after-time, when those of his father got the better or perhaps the worse of them.' He was again painted by Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., about 1865, and by Mr. Rudolf Lehmann in 1859 and several later occasions. The portraits by Watts and Lehmann are in the National Portrait Gallery. In his last years Browning, with extreme good-nature, was willing to sit for his portrait to any one who asked him. He was once discovered in Venice, surrounded, like a model in a life-class, by a group of artistic ladies, each taking him off from a different point of view. Of these representations of Browning as an old man, the best are certainly those executed by his son, in particular a portrait painted in the summer and autumn of 1880. The publications of Robert Browning, with their dates of issue, have been mentioned in the course of the narrative. The first of the collected editions, the so-called 'New Edition' of 1849, in 2 vols., was not complete even up to date. Much more comprehensive was the third edition' (really the second) of the ‘Poetical Works of Robert Browning' issued in 1863. A 'fourth' (third) appeared in 1865. 'Selections' were published in 1863 and 1865. The earliest edition of the 'Poetical Works' which was complete in any true sense was that issued by Messrs. Smith, Elder, & Co. in 1868, in six volumes; here 'Pauline' first reappeared, and here is published for the first time the poem entitled 'Deaf and Dumb.' These volumes represent Browning's achievements down to, but not including, 'The Ring and the Book.' Further independent selections were published in 1872 and 1880; and both were reprinted in 1884. A beautiful separate edition of 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin,' made to accompany Pinwell's drawings, belongs to 1884. The edition of Browning's works, in sixteen volumes, was issued in 1888-9, and contains everything but 'Asolando.' In 1896 there appeared a complete edition, in two volumes, edited by Mr. Augustine Birrell, Q.C., M.P., and Mr. F. G. Kenyon. A claim has been made for the authorship by Browning of John Forster's 'Life of Strafford,' originally published in 1836; and this book was rashly reprinted by the Browning Society in 1892 as 'Robert Browning's Prose Life of Strafford.' This attribution was immediately repudiated, in the least equivocal terms possible, by the surviving representatives of the Browning and Forster families. It is possible that Forster may have received some help from Browning in the preparation of the book, but it was certainly written by Forster. THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON SIDNEY COLVIN [From the Dictionary of National Biography.] STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (1850-1894), novelist, essayist, poet, and traveller, was born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, on 13 Nov. 1850. He was baptised Robert Lewis Balfour, but from about his eighteenth year dropped the use of the third christian name and changed the spelling of the second to Louis; signing thereafter Robert Louis in full, and being called always Louis by his family and intimate friends. On both sides of the house he was sprung from capable and cultivated stock. His father, Thomas Stevenson, was a member of the distinguished Edinburgh firm of civil engineers. His mother was Margaret Isabella (d. 14 May 1897), youngest daughter of James Balfour, for many years minister of the parish of Colinton in Midlothian, and grandson to James Balfour (1705-1795), professor at Edinburgh first of moral philosophy and afterwards of the law of nature and of nations. His mother's father was described by his grandson in the essay called 'The Manse.' Robert Louis was his parents' only child. His mother was subject in early and middle life to chest and nerve troubles, and her son may have inherited from her some of his constitutional weakness as well as of his intellectual vivacity and taste for letters. His health was infirm from the first. He suffered from frequent bronchial affections and acute nervous excitability, and in the autumn of 1858 was near dying of a gastric fever. In January 1853 his parents moved to No. 1 Inverleith Terrace, and in May 1857 to 17 Heriot Row, which continued to be their Edinburgh home until the father's death in 1887. Much of his time was also spent in the manse at Colinton on the water of Leith, the home of his maternal grandfather. If he suffered much as a child from the distresses, he also enjoyed to the full the pleasures, of imagination. He was eager in every kind of play, and made the most of all the amusements natural to an only child kept much indoors by ill-health. The child in him never died; and the zest with which in after life he would throw himself into the pursuits of |