Life and Letters of Robert Browning | Page 6

Homeric combats among the boys, in
which the fighting was carried on in the manner of the Greeks and
Trojans, and he and his friend Kenyon would arm themselves with
swords and shields, and hack at each other lustily, exciting themselves
to battle by insulting speeches derived from the Homeric text.*
* This anecdote is partly quoted from Mrs. Andrew Crosse, who has
introduced it into her article 'John Kenyon and his Friends', 'Temple
Bar', April 1890. She herself received it from Mr. Dykes Campbell.
Mr. Browning had also an extraordinary power of versifying, and
taught his son from babyhood the words he wished him to remember,
by joining them to a grotesque rhyme; the child learned all his Latin
declensions in this way. His love of art had been proved by his desire to
adopt it as a profession; his talent for it was evidenced by the life and
power of the sketches, often caricatures, which fell from his pen or
pencil as easily as written words. Mr. Barrett Browning remembers

gaining a very early elementary knowledge of anatomy from comic
illustrated rhymes (now in the possession of their old friend, Mrs.
Fraser Corkran) through which his grandfather impressed upon him the
names and position of the principal bones of the human body.
Even more remarkable than his delight in reading was the manner in
which Mr. Browning read. He carried into it all the preciseness of the
scholar. It was his habit 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. More than one book thus treated by him has
passed through my hands, leaving in me, it need hardly be said, a
stronger impression of the owner's intellectual quality than the
acquisition by him of the finest library could have conveyed. One of
the experiences which disgusted him with St. Kitt's was the frustration
by its authorities of an attempt he was making to teach a negro boy to
read, and the understanding that all such educative action was
prohibited.
In his faculties and attainments, as in his pleasures and appreciations,
he showed the simplicity and genuineness of a child. He was not only
ready to amuse, he could always identify himself with children, his
love for whom never failed him in even his latest years. His more than
childlike indifference to pecuniary advantages had been shown in early
life. He gave another proof of it after his wife's death, when he declined
a proposal, made to him by the Bank of England, to assist in founding
one of its branch establishments in Liverpool. He never indeed,
personally, cared for money, except as a means of acquiring old, i.e.
rare books, for which he had, as an acquaintance declared, the scent of
a hound and the snap of a bulldog. His eagerness to possess such
treasures was only matched by the generosity with which he parted
with them; and his daughter well remembers the feeling of angry
suspicion with which she and her brother noted the periodical arrival of
a certain visitor who would be closeted with their father for hours, and
steal away before the supper time, when the family would meet, with

some precious parcel of books or prints under his arm.
It is almost superfluous to say that he was indifferent to creature
comforts. Miss Browning was convinced that, if on any occasion she
had said to him, 'There will be no dinner to-day,' he would only have
looked up from his book to reply, 'All right, my dear, it is of no
consequence.' In his bank-clerk days, when he sometimes dined in
Town, he left one restaurant with which he was not otherwise
dissatisfied, because the waiter always gave him the trouble of
specifying what he would have to eat. A hundred times that trouble
would not have deterred him from a kindly act. Of his goodness of
heart, indeed, many distinct instances might be given; but even this
scanty outline of his life has rendered them superfluous.
Mr. Browning enjoyed splendid physical health. His early love of
reading had not precluded a wholesome enjoyment of athletic sports;
and he was, as a boy, the fastest runner and best base-ball player in his
school. He died, like his father, at eighty-four (or rather, within a few
days of eighty-five), but, unlike him, he had never been ill; a French
friend exclaimed when all was over, 'Il n'a jamais ete vieux.' His
faculties were so unclouded up to the last moment that he could watch