while there in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father’s profound astonishment and rage."[2] At the age of twenty-two he obtained a clerkship in the Bank of England, an employment which, his son says, he always detested.  Eight years later he married Sarah Anna, daughter of William Wiedemann, a Dundee shipowner, who was the son of a German merchant of Hamburg.  The young man’s father, on hearing that his son was a suitor to Miss Wiedemann, had waited benevolently on her uncle “to assure him that his niece would be thrown away on a man so evidently born to be hanged."[3] In 1811 the new-married pair settled in Camberwell, and there in a house in Southampton Street Robert Browning—­an only son—­was born on May 7, 1812.  Two years later (Jan. 7, 1814) his sister, Sarah Anna—­an only daughter—­known in later years as Sarianna, a form adopted by her father, was born.  She survived her brother, dying in Venice on the morning of April 22, 1903.[4]

Robert Browning’s father and mother were persons who for their own sakes deserve to be remembered.  His father, while efficient in his work in the Bank, was a wide and exact reader of literature, classical as well as modern.  We are told by Mrs Orr of his practice of soothing his little boy to sleep “by humming to him an ode of Anacreon,” and by Dr Moncure Conway that he was versed in mediaeval legend, and seemed to have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages with an intimate familiarity.  He wrote verses in excellent couplets of the eighteenth century manner, and strung together fantastic rhymes as a mode of aiding his boy in tasks which tried the memory.  He was a dexterous draughtsman, and of his amateur handiwork in portraiture and caricature—­sometimes produced, as it were, instinctively, 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