1876. Henry Morley, a few words on Browning: quotes bits of Paracelsus, Sordello, and all Memorabilia and Andrea del Sarto, in 'Cassell's Library of English Literature:''Shorter Poems,' pp. 467-471. 1876. [F. Pollock] Leading Cases done into English.' By an Apprentice of Lincoln's Inn. Reprinted from the 'Pall Mall Gazette.' 2nd edition, London : Macmillan and Co. "IV. Scott v. Shepherd (1 Smith's Leading Cases, 477). 'Any Pleader to any Student:' 'Now, you're my Pupil,'" pp. 15-19, is a parody o. R. B. (The next "V.—' Wigglesworth v. Dallison,'” pp. 20-25, is a parody of Tennyson.) ...... 1872. Alfred Domeṭt [Waring] in Ranolf and Amohia, p. 342: see p. 162 below. A lay dark-splendid as star-spangled night;- Subtlest Assertor of the Soul in Song."-A. DOMETT. 1876. Walter Savage Landor: A Biography. By John Forster. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Contains some interesting particulars of Browning's residence in Italy and of his intercourse with Landor.-S. 1876. Prof. E. Dowden. 'Academy,' July 29, on Pacchiarotto. 1876. F. J. F. (on Inn Album), 5 N. & Q., v. 244. See p. 67, note, above.. 1876. The Guardian,' Sept. 27, on Pacchiarotto.-C. 1876. Public Opinion,' July 29, reproduces some weak insolence of the 'Liverpool Daily Poston Pacchiarotto.-C. 1876. Macmillan,' March, 1876, pp. 418-429. 'William Bell Scott and Modern British Poetry.' Signed, W. M. Rossetti. pp. 425-6 are on R. Browning.-C. 1876. Mr. Browning's Inn Album. By A. C. Bradley. 'Macmillan's Magazine,' February, 1876 (vol. xxxiii. pp. 347-354).-S. 1876. Victorian Poets.' By Edmund Clarence Stedman. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876. The ninth chapter, on Robert Browning, occupies pp. 293-341 of the volume.-S. 1876. Athenæum,' July 22, pp. 101-2, on Pacchiarotto, &c. "Mr. Browning came into notice an etcher. Etching. is a species of shorthand. . . To the appreciative critic it stands not for what it actually offers to the eye, but for what it suggests... Mr. Browning is, and always has been, an etcher. His mistake all through has been to suppose that people will take the trouble to wrestle with difficulties; that because his longer poems are worth understanding, the public would try to understand them. If there is a defect in it [the Pacchiarotto volume] it is that Mr. Browning betrays a tendency to quarrel with his critics, and to write not so much about himself as at himself. . . If a man chooses to say that Mr. Browning is grotesque, uncouth, chaotic, and no poet, the criticism may possibly please the critic, and cannot possibly hurt Mr. Browning.' 1876. The Index to The Atlantic Monthly,' volumes I.-XXXVIII. (1857-1876). Boston Houghton & Co., 1877, gives in its Index to "Authors, with the contributions of each" to that journal "Browning, Robert Gold Hair (vol.) xiii. (p.) 596; Prospice, xiii. 694; Under the Cliff, xiii. 737." This means that the publisher got advance-copies of the Dramatis Persona, 1864, and reprinted three of the poems in his Journals. Mr. Moncure Daniel Conway is enterd as having written an editorial' on the Ring and the Book in vol. xxiii. p. 256; Mr. Howells another on The Inn Album in xxxvii. 372. The want of an index to the books reviewd' prevented my finding more notices in the time I had to spare. 1876. James Thomson, in 'The Secularist' on Pacchiarotto. 1877. Henry Morley, on Browning's Christmas-Eve and Easter Day, with quotations in 'Cassell's Library of English Literature: Illustrations of English Religion,' pp. 428-9. The por 1877. No. 14. Price 6d. "The Portrait.' A Photograph and Memoir. Robert Browning. Provost and Co., 36, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. trait is from a Photograph by Messrs Elliott and Fry. The Memoir, 4 pages 4to, is by G. Barnett Smith. It ends "Since Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth sang, we have had no greater imaginative spirit, none with a genius more manly and robust, than Robert Browning. As regards the extent and quality of his original endowments, he is the equal-if indeed he has not the precedence --of any living poet. Men have yet to grow in the understanding of him. . . .' 1877. 'Judy,' 31 Jan. Cut of a policeman or bobby roasting on a jack before a fire, with legend, Who's this? Who? Why, you can see it at a glance-ROBERT, BROWNING."-C. 1877. Contemporary Review,' July, 1877. pp. 297-318. 'The Transcendental movement and Literature,' by Edward Dowden. pp. 316-318.-R. B. "represents militant transcendentalism."-C. Reprinted in E. D.'s 'Studies,' 1878. 1877. 'Athenæum,' Oct. 27, on The Agamemnon of Æschylus.1 1877. The Bazaar,' Nov. 7, on the Agamemnon.-C. 1877. 'Saturday Review,' Nov. 17, on Translations of the Agamemnon: 1. by Robert Browning; 2. by E. D. A. Morshead, M.A.-C. 1877. J. A. Symonds. Academy,' Nov. 3, on The Agamemnon of Eschylus. 66 The Herculean achievement of a scholar-poet's ripe genius. The more we examine the workmanship of Mr. Browning's version, comparing English and Greek verses in detail, the more reason shall we have to wonder at his dexterity in matching word with word, and maintaining the exact order of the original.' 1877. Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, addressed to Richard Hengist Horne, with Preface and Memoir by Richard Henry Stoddard. New York: James Miller, Publisher, 1877. The Memoir often mentions Browning from p. xix to xxxvii, gives, from G. S. Hillard, the anecdote of Browning's introduction to Miss Barrett, their marriage, a description of their room at Florence, Bayard Taylor's account of the Brownings, R. B.'s pretty letter about his wife and boy, to Leigh Hunt, and hers on the boy then 8 years old, &c. See 'Additions' below. 1877. Alfred Domett (Waring). Flotsam and Jetsam; rhymes old and new.' London Smith, Elder & Co., 1877. "To (if ever there were one !) a mighty Poet and a subtle-souled Psychologist,'--to Robert Browning, this little Book, with a hearty wish that the Tribute were worthier, is affectionately inscribed. On p. 25-27 are 51 "Lines sent to Robert Browning, 1841," on a certain Critique on Pippa Passes, by A black squat beetle-a Pert, self-complacent Scarabæus' who, because he can't scale a mountain in his way, swears There's no such thing as any mountain there';-by a bustling Cockchafer who tries to measure an Eagle, and finds that as he can only see a dot just like himself, the Bird must be as small.' The poem begins thus : 6 "Ho! every one that by the nose is led, 1 Mr. F. A. Paley wrote a note in the Athenæum ' of Nov. 11, contradicting a letter by Mr. Swinburne in the no. of Nov. 4, and saying that Browning and Mr. Swinburne were both wrong in their construing of lines 1672-3 of the Agamemnon, while both Mr. Morshead and Miss Anna Swanwick were right. 1878. Browning's Poems. Church Quarterly Review,' Oct., 1878, pp. 65-92. By the Hon. & Rev. Arthur Lyttelton. "In the difficulty of his style Mr. Browning is not alone; many great poets have found it impossible to express deep thoughts to the satisfaction of shallow readers (p. 67). . . We should... hold the true explanation of the rough and crude expression of his thought to be, not his ignorance of the value of form, but his intense desire to grasp the matter, to penetrate to the innermost meaning of the facts with which he is dealing (p. 68) the disregard of the form of his poems, in his eager haste to express the matter, is only a particular case of the general characteristic of Mr. Browning's mind, which leads him To bring the invisible full into play! Let the visible go to the dogs-what matters?' Mr. Browning's preference of matter to form is the result of what is perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of his mind, the belief that imperfection is a mark of progress, that man is superior to the beasts just because he is not made with all his powers complete for their work in his life, but must struggle onwards by means of failure in this world, to the perfection which can only be attained in the next (p. 70). . . His [Browning's] genius is essentially dramatic in one sense, namely, that he can leave his own personality to put himself into the position, or even into the very heart and soul of another person. In this faculty he is, we venture to say, second to no poet, unless it be Shakspeare and his imagination also seems to seize hold on their (his personages') deepest emotions, and give words to them with a power which, we repeat, is more nearly equal to Shakspeare's similar power, than is that of any other poet. In The Last Ride Together, for instance, the line 'Who knows but the world may end to-night?' may for depth and vividness of imaginative power be compared with Macduff's 'He has no children,' which is Mr. Ruskin's highest instance of this kind of imagination. . . But in what is more strictly dramatic power, the power of dramatic action, Mr. Browning is notably deficient. The whole interest of his dramas or dramatic monologues lies in the varying states of mind of the characters represented. The action is nothing, and the personages are interesting to the poet, not because of what they do, but of what they think and feel (p. 73).. For him there are two great realities: "Truth inside [man's soul], and outside, truth also [God]; and between Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence. The individual soul works through the shows of sense, Up to an outer soul as individual too; (Which ever proving false, still promise to be true,) And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed, And reach at length "God, man, or both together mixed,' Fifine, p. 156-7. In A “If, as a matter of fact, he believes that the events recorded in the Gospels really happened, this is little more than an accidental_circumstance; it does not seem to him to be of any real importance whether they did or not. Death in the Desert the question as to the reality of Christ's miracles is, not avoided, but neglected as unimportant (pp. 79-80). The only two truths being the soul and God, and between each, falsehood,' the method by which God works upon the soul must be by means of falsehood, or at best, ofthe shows o' the world.' As they are only shows, mere mists,' the question whether any particular combination of them really took place or not is insignificant, and the poet treats it doubtfully and vaguely (p. 81). . it is from his firm belief in God's Love that the poet has attained to the two great Christian truths which so continually come up in his writings, viz. the Incarnation and Immortality. p. 83. [This is well workt out thro' Easter Day, A Death in the Desert, Saul (a fine comment, p. 86), La Saisiaz, Christmas Eve, Abt Vogler].. In all these cases and many others, we see the conception of immortality entering into every part of Mr. Browning's experience of life, dignifying things that would otherwise seem trivial, making perfect the manifold imperfections of this world. . It is this conviction of the future, this intense belief that no work begun shall 6 .. ever pause for death,' that raises Mr. Browning's interest in man, and his persistent examination and analysis of characters and deeds which many would think unworthy to be touched, to a dignity which would not be possible if human life were bounded by this world, or even if the future life were to be, as so many believe, entirely separate and distinct in its nature from this. A future life in which nothing of our present existence survives, which is merely the reward, and not the result, of the good which has been attained here, is not Mr. Browning's conception of our promised immortality; and therefore to him all those traits of character that had almost perished, those persons and deeds that but for him no one could have remembered, are of intense interest, because in his eyes they have an eternal significance (pp. 88-9).... (p. 92) In conclusion, then, we should wish our readers to take this as the noblest characteristic of Mr. Browning's genius: this power of exalting man and man's deeds, not by idealizing him, or by taking him out of the real conditions of his life, but by giving him his true dignity as an immortal being, whom God's love has placed here to grow and prepare himself for a wider, more perfect life hereafter. We cannot fail to learn from Mr. Browning's poems a higher and nobler, because a truer, conception of mankind; for he bases his sympathy with men, and his firm belief in their great destiny, on a truth that can never alter, the truth that God is Love." An Article to be read by all students of Browning. 1878. G. A. Simcox. 'Academy,' June 1, on La Saisiaz, and Croisic. "Like Descartes, Mr. Browning establishes the two ultimate facts of God and the soul by a simple appeal to consciousness we get one of the most forcible statements in the English language of the unsatisfactory nature of the conditions we live under, and of the illusory nature of all the palliations suggested by them who wish to discredit the old one, that there is a better life to come." His poet's Confession of Faith is summed up in a line, “Well? why he at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God." "The main problem of the poem [Croisic]... is . . . the tragedy of abortive endeavour, complicated with the comedy of momentary success.' 1878. Athenæum,' May 25, pp. 661-4, on La Saisiaz. "No poet since Burnsnone, perhaps, since Shakspeare-has known and felt as deeply as Mr. Browning, the pathos of human life none realizes, as he does, the unutterable pathos of the tangled web as a whole." By W. Theodore Watts. His best, he says. 1878. Edinburgh Review,' April, 1878. pp. 409-436. Browning's Agamemnon, and Campbell's Trachiniæ.'-C. 1878. 'Saturday Review,' June 15, on La Saisiaz (&) The Two Poets of Croisic. 1878. 'The Times,' June 20. Royal Academy of Music. Notice of a Student's, Miss Oliveria Prescott's, symphony in D minor, called 'Alkestis, "suggested by the version of Euripides's tragedy in Mr. Browning's Balaustion's Adventure." 1878. Rev. J. Kirkman.1 Letter in The Times' of Sept. 25, on the autumn blossoming of the laburnum, instancing Browning's lines on 'That apple-tree with a rare after-birth,' in Paracelsus. 1878. The Guardian,' Dec. 4, on La Saisiaz [&] The Two Poets of Croisic. Lantern Readings (no place, pubn. or date). The Pied Piper of Hamelin, illustrated by 12 Lantern Pictures. "The following extracts from the P. P. of H., are given for those not familiar with the piece. To purchasers of the pictures a copy of vol. iv. of Carpenter's Penny Readings,' that contains the entire piece, is supplied." (I never saw the pictures.)-C. 1879. Studies in Literature,' 1789-1877. By Edward Dowden, LL.D. London: C. K. Paul & Co. Contains revized Reprints of the Articles on 'The Transcendental Movement and Literature' (Mr. Browning's place in recent literature), and on Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning,' 1877, 1869, noted above, p. 103, 96. These able appreciative articles should be read. 1 Mr. Kirkman a few years ago gave a set of lectures at Hampstead on Sordello which were largely attended, and greatly interested the audience. He is to deliver the Inaugural Address at the first meeting of the Browning Society. 1879. G. Barnett Smith, in 'The International Review,' for February; 19 quarto pages on the general aspects of Browning's Poetry. 1879. Contemporary Portraits. Robert Browning. With photograph of Mr. Browning by Elliott and Fry, copied by the Woodbury process: and facsimile of his autograph. The University Magazine, a Literary and Philosophic Review,' March and April, 1879. London: Hurst and Blackett, vol. iii. pp. 322-335, 416-443. Contains some interesting particulars of the poet's youth and parentage.-S. It is the most trustworthy account then published. 1879. The Boy's Own Paper.' London: Leisure Hour Office, vol. i, Part II. No. 10, p. 151. March 22, 1879. How they brought the Good News, &c. With Frontispiece of the Ride.-C. 1879. Mr. Browning's Dramatic Idyls. [Series I.] By Mrs. Sutherland Orr. 'Contemporary Review,' May, 1879, vol. xxxv. pp. 289-302.-S. 1879. 'Athenæum,' May 10, on Dramatic Idyls, I. “Martin Ralph, Ned Bratt, and Halbert and Hob are illustrations, from different points of view of the terrors of conscience. This has always been a favourite subject with Mr. Browning, and perhaps no other modern writer has treated it in so masterly a manner.. With him, the special terror of conscience is always, as in Pippa Passes, its treachery; it is always a snake coiled in the bosom, whose fang, as delineated by him, is hardly so well expressed by the Latin word remorse, as by [its English equivalent] the name of.. Dan Michel[s].. Ayen-bite of Inwyt,' the again-biting of the inner knowledge'... 'ayenbite of inwyt' exactly expresses Mr. Browning's idea of conscience." (By Mr. Walter Theodore Watts.) 1879. F. Wedmore. 'Academy,' May 10, Dramatic Idyls, I. 1879. 'Saturday Review,' June 21, on Dramatic Idyls, I. 1879. F. Wedmore, in 'The Academy,' May 10, pp. 403-4, on Dramatic Idyls (I.). "Mr. Browning has not found increasing years make so much a difference of quality as a difference of kind in his poetry. Convinced at first that 'Thought is what young men want in verse,' he has waxed yet more occupied with the mental interest of his subject. in the main the dramatic interest . . has gained yet more in importance over the interest of sense, the interest of skilled manipulation because, perhaps, of the generally increasing weight of thought and dramatic interest in his work, the manner of the work has changed, so that it may be roughly said that while his By the Fireside, with its tender reverie, was like a symphony of Mendelssohn's, and some of his lyrics like the Songs without Words, much of his later work-that of the Inn Album : this of Dramatic Idyls-comes to us with the clash and clang of the music of Wagner, or . at all events like 'Beethoven's Titan mace.' ... ? 1879 or 1880. 'National Portrait Gallery,' Part 70. London: Cassells No date. Robert Browning, pp. 73-80. Written by Mr. G. Barnett Smith. With Chromolithograph of R. B.-C. 66 1879. The Pied Piper of Hamelin. By Robert Browning. Illustrated by Jane E. Cook, author of The Sculptor caught Napping," King Alfred's School, Wantage, Berks, Photographed and Printed by the Autotype Company's Process of Permanent Facsimile. London Printed for Private Circulation. 1879. The work was favourably reviewd in 'The Times' of April 10, 1880, the Academy,' Art Journal, World,' Architect,' 'Daily Telegraph,' 'British Architect,' 'Builder,' 'Athenæum,' and 'Standard,' which last says: "The drawings are nine in number. The first represents the rats biting the babies in their cradles and licking the soup from the cook's own ladles.' The next represents the rats worrying the dogs, killing the cats, and making nests in men's new hats.' There is life and vigour in all the characters. In the third the appearance of the Pied Piper, who offers to the Burgomaster and his Council to clear the town of rats, is cleverly depicted, while nothing could be well more humourous than the expression on the face of the fat old Burgomaster and his colleagues. The fourth picture, representing the rats tumbling by dozens into the Weser, and the Piper standing up on the quay playing vigourously, while men, women, and children are crowding up behind him to see the destruction of the common foe, is wonderfully clever and full of 'go.' In the remainder of the series Mrs. Cook sustains the same appearance |