of almost feminine tenderness and charm.  All his life long he was passionately devoted to literature, to art, to children.  He collected rare books and prints with avidity, but was no less generous in giving them away.  Indifferent to money, he hated to see a scrap of paper wasted.  He had a neat touch in epigrams, and a boyish delight in grotesque rhymes.  But there was no lack of grit in this accomplished, fresh-minded, and lovable man.  He had the tough fibre of his race; only it was the wrongs of others that called out its tenacity, not his own.  While holding an appointment on his mother’s West Indian estate, he braved the fierce resentment of the whole colony by teaching a negro-boy to read; and finally incurred disinheritance rather than draw a livelihood from slave-labour.  This Shelleyan act involved for him the resignation of his intellectual and artistic ambitions; and with the docility characteristic of him, where only his own interests were concerned, he forthwith entered the fairly well-paid but unexciting service of the Bank.

In 1811 he married, and on May 7 of the following year his eldest son, Robert, was born.  His wife was the daughter of a German shipowner, William Wiedemann, who had settled and married at Dundee.  Wiedemann is said to have been an accomplished draughtsman and musician, and his daughter, without herself sharing these gifts, probably passed them on to her son.  Whether she also communicated from her Scottish and German ancestry the “metaphysical” proclivities currently ascribed to him, is a hypothesis absolutely in the air.[1] What is clear is that she was herself intellectually simple and of few ideas, but rich in the temperament, at once nervous and spiritual, which when present in the mother so often becomes genius in the son.  “She was a divine woman,” such was her son’s brief sufficing tribute.  Physically he seems to have closely resembled her,[2] and they were bound together by a peculiarly passionate love from first to last.

[Footnote 1:  A similar but more groundless suggestion, that the author of Holy-cross Day and Rabbi ben Ezra probably had Jewish blood in his veins, can only be described as an impertinence—­not to Browning but to the Jewish race.  As if to feel the spiritual genius of Hebraism and to be moved by the pathos of Hebraic fate were an eccentricity only to be accounted for by the bias of kin!  It is significant that his demonstrable share of German blood left him rather conspicuously impervious to the literary—­and more especially to the “metaphysical”—­products of the German mind.]

[Footnote 2:  Browning himself reports the exclamation of the family doctor when trying to diagnose an attack of his:  “Why, has anybody to search far for a cause of whatever nervous disorder you may suffer from, when there sits your mother—­whom you so absolutely resemble!” (Letters to E.B.B., ii. 456.)]