Life of Robert Browning | Page 8

the poet's genius. Possibly the main current of his
ancestry is as little strictly English as German. A friend sends me the
following paragraph from a Scottish paper: -- "What of the Scottish
Brownings? I had it long ago from one of the name that the Brownings
came originally from Ayrshire, and that several families of them
emigrated to the North of Ireland during the times of the Covenanters.
There is, moreover, a small town or village in the North of Ireland
called Browningstown. Might not the poet be related to these Scottish
Brownings?"
-- * It has frequently been stated that Browning's maternal grandfather,
Mr. Wiedemann, was a Jew. Mr. Wiedemann, the son of a Hamburg
merchant, was a small shipowner in Dundee. Had he, or his father, been
Semitic, he would not have baptised one of his daughters `Christiana'.
--
Browning's great-grandfather, as indicated above, was a small
proprietor in Dorsetshire. His son, whether perforce or from choice,
removed to London when he was a youth, and speedily obtained a
clerkship in the Bank of England, where he remained for fifty years, till
he was pensioned off in 1821 with over 400 Pounds a year. He died in
1833. His wife, to whom he was married in or about 1780, was one
Margaret Morris Tittle, a Creole, born in the West Indies. Her portrait,
by Wright of Derby, used to hang in the poet's dining-room. They
resided, Mr. R. Barrett Browning tells me, in Battersea, where his
grandfather was their first-born. The paternal grandfather of the poet
decided that his three sons, Robert, William Shergold, and Reuben,
should go into business, the two younger in London, the elder abroad.

All three became efficient financial clerks, and attained to good
positions and fair means.* The eldest, Robert, was a man of exceptional
powers. He was a poet, both in sentiment and expression; and he
understood, as well as enjoyed, the excellent in art. He was a scholar,
too, in a reputable fashion: not indifferent to what he had learnt in his
youth, nor heedless of the high opinion generally entertained for the
greatest writers of antiquity, but with a particular care himself for
Horace and Anacreon. As his son once told a friend, "The old
gentleman's brain was a storehouse of literary and philosophical
antiquities. He was completely versed in mediaeval legend, and seemed
to have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages,
personally" -- a significant detail, by the way. He was fond of metrical
composition, and his ease and grace in the use of the heroic couplet
were the admiration, not only of his intellectual associates, but, in later
days, of his son, who was wont to affirm, certainly in all seriousness,
that expressionally his father was a finer poetic artist than himself.
Some one has recorded of him that he was an authority on the Letters
of Junius: fortunately he had more tangible claims than this to the
esteem of his fellows. It was his boast that, notwithstanding the
exigencies of his vocation, he knew as much of the history of art as any
professional critic. His extreme modesty is deducible from this naive
remark. He was an amateur artist, moreover, as well as poet, critic, and
student. I have seen several of his drawings which are praiseworthy: his
studies in portraiture, particularly, are ably touched: and, as is well
known, he had an active faculty of pictorial caricature. In the intervals
of leisure which beset the best regulated clerk he was addicted to
making drawings of the habitual visitors to the Bank of England, in
which he had obtained a post on his return, in 1803, from the West
Indies, and in the enjoyment of which he remained till 1853, when he
retired on a small pension. His son had an independent income, but
whether from a bequest, or in the form of an allowance from his then
unmarried Uncle Reuben, is uncertain. In the first year of his marriage
Mr. Browning resided in an old house in Southampton Street, Peckham,
and there the poet was born. The house was long ago pulled down, and
another built on its site. Mr. Browning afterwards removed to another
domicile in the same Peckham district. Many years later, he and his
family left Camberwell and resided at Hatcham, near New Cross,

where his brothers and sisters (by his father's second marriage) lived.
There was a stable attached to the Hatcham house, and in it Mr. Reuben
Browning kept his horse, which he let his poet-nephew ride, while he
himself was at his desk in Rothschild's bank. No doubt this horse was
the `York' alluded to by the poet in the letter quoted, as a footnote, at
page 189 [
Chapter 9
] of this book. Some years after his wife's