Asolo -- Letters to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, Mrs. Skirrow, and Mr. G. M. Smith.
Chapter 22

1889
Proposed Purchase of Land at Asolo -- Venice --

Letter to Mr. G. Moulton-Barrett -- Lines in the `Athenaeum' --
Letter to Miss Keep -- Illness -- Death -- Funeral Ceremonial at Venice --

Publication of `Asolando' -- Interment in Poets' Corner.
Conclusion

Index
-----------------------------------

Life and Letters of Robert Browning
-----------------------------------

Chapter 1
Origin of the Browning Family -- Robert Browning's Grandfather --

His position and Character -- His first and second Marriage --
Unkindness towards his eldest Son, Robert Browning's Father --

Alleged Infusion of West Indian Blood through Robert Browning's Grandmother
-- Existing Evidence against it -- The Grandmother's Portrait.

A belief was current in Mr. Browning's lifetime that he had Jewish blood
in his veins. It received outward support from certain accidents of his life,

from his known interest in the Hebrew language and literature,
from his friendship for various members of the Jewish community in London.

It might well have yielded to the fact of his never claiming the kinship,
which could not have existed without his knowledge, and which,

if he had known it, he would, by reason of these very sympathies,
have been the last person to disavow. The results of more recent

and more systematic" target="_blank" title="a.有系统的，成体系的">systematicinquiry have shown the belief to be unfounded.
Our poet sprang, on the father's side, from an obscure or,

as family tradition asserts, a decayed branch, of an Anglo-Saxon stock
settled, at an early period of our history, in the south,

and probably also south-west, of England. A line of Brownings
owned the manors of Melbury-Sampford and Melbury-Osmond,

in north-west Dorsetshire; their last representative disappeared --
or was believed to do so -- in the time of Henry VII.,

their manors passing into the hands of the Earls of Ilchester,
who still hold them.* The name occurs after 1542 in different parts

of the country: in two cases with the affix of `esquire', in two also,
though not in both coincidently, within twenty miles of Pentridge,

where the first distinct traces of the poet's family appear.
Its cradle, as he called it, was Woodyates, in the parish of Pentridge,

on the Wiltshire confines of Dorsetshire; and there his ancestors,
of the third and fourth generations, held, as we understand,

a modest but independent social position.
--

* I am indebted for these facts, as well as for some others
referring to, or supplied by, Mr. Browning's uncles,

to some notes made for the Browning Society by Dr. Furnivall.
--

This fragment of history, if we may so call it, accords better
with our impression of Mr. Browning's genius than could any pedigree

which more palpably connected him with the `knightly' and `squirely' families
whose name he bore. It supplies the strong roots of English national life

to which we instinctively refer it. Both the vivid originality of that genius
and its healthy assimilative power stamp it as, in some sense,

the product of virgin soil; and although the varied elements
which entered into its growth were racial as well as cultural,

and inherited as well as absorbed, the evidence of its strong
natural or physical basis remains undisturbed.

Mr. Browning, for his own part, maintained a neutral attitude in the matter.
He neither claimed nor disclaimed the more remote genealogical past

which had presented itself as a certainty to some older members of his family.
He preserved the old framed coat-of-arms handed down to him

from his grandfather; and used, without misgiving as to his right to do so,
a signet-ring engraved from it, the gift of a favourite uncle,

in years gone by. But, so long as he was young, he had no reason
to think about his ancestors; and, when he was old, he had no reason

to care about them; he knew himself to be, in every possible case,
the most important fact in his family history.

Roi ne suis, ni Prince aussi,
Suis le seigneur de Conti,

he wrote, a few years back, to a friend who had incidentally
questioned him about it.

Our immediate knowledge of the family begins with Mr. Browning's grandfather,
also a Robert Browning, who obtained through Lord Shaftesbury's influence

a clerkship in the Bank of England, and entered on it when barely twenty,
in 1769. He served fifty years, and rose to the position of

Principal of the Bank Stock Office, then an important one,
and which brought him into contact with the leading financiers of the day.

He became also a lieutenant in the Honourable Artillery Company,
and took part in the defence of the Bank in the Gordon Riots of 1789.

He was an able, energetic, and worldly man: an Englishman,
very much of the provincial type; his literary tastes being limited

to the Bible and `Tom Jones', both of which he is said to have read through
once a year. He possessed a handsome person and, probably,

a vigorousconstitution, since he lived to the age of eighty-four,
though frequently tormented by gout; a circumstance which may help

to account for his not having seen much of his grandchildren,
the poet and his sister; we are indeed told that he particularly dreaded

the lively boy's vicinity to his afflicted foot. He married, in 1778,
Margaret, daughter of a Mr. Tittle by his marriage with Miss Seymour;

and who was born in the West Indies and had inherited property there.
They had three children: Robert, the poet's father; a daughter,

who lived an uneventful life and plays no part in the family history;
and another son who died an infant. The Creole mother died also

when her eldest boy was only seven years old, and passed out of his memory
in all but an indistinctimpression of having seen her lying in her coffin.

Five years later the widower married a Miss Smith, who gave him
a large family.

This second marriage of Mr. Browning's was a critical event
in the life of his eldest son; it gave him, to all appearance,

two step-parents instead of one. There could have been little sympathy
between his father and himself, for no two persons were ever more unlike,

but there was yet another cause for the systematic" target="_blank" title="a.有系统的，成体系的">systematic unkindness
under which the lad grew up. Mr. Browning fell, as a hard man easily does,

greatly under the influence of his second wife, and this influence
was made by her to subserve the interests of a more than natural jealousy

of her predecessor. An early instance of this was her banishing
the dead lady's portrait to a garret, on the plea that her husband

did not need two wives. The son could be no burden upon her
because he had a little income, derived from his mother's brother;

but this, probably, only heightened her ill-will towards him.
When he was old enough to go to a University, and very desirous of going --

when, moreover, he offered to do so at his own cost --
she induced his father to forbid it, because, she urged,

they could not afford to send their other sons to college.
An earlier ambition of his had been to become an artist;

but when he showed his first completed picture to his father, the latter
turned away and refused to look at it. He gave himself the finishing stroke

in the parental eyes, by throwing up a lucrative employment
which he had held for a short time on his mother's West Indian property,

in disgust at the system of slave labour which was still in force there;
and he paid for this unpractical conduct as soon as he was of age,

by the compulsory reimbursement of all the expenses which his father,
up to that date, had incurred for him; and by the loss

of his mother's fortune, which, at the time of her marriage, had not been
settled upon her. It was probably in despair of doing anything better,

that, soon after this, in his twenty-second year, he also became a clerk
in the Bank of England. He married and settled in Camberwell, in 1811;

his son and daughter were born, respectively, in 1812 and 1814.
He became a widower in 1849; and when, four years later, he had completed

his term of service at the Bank, he went with his daughter to Paris,
where they resided until his death in 1866.

Dr. Furnivall has originated a theory, and maintains it as a conviction,
that Mr. Browning's grandmother was more than a Creole

in the strict sense of the term, that of a person born of white parents
in the West Indies, and that an unmistakable dash of dark blood

passed from her to her son and grandson. Such an occurrence was,
on the face of it, not impossible, and would be absolutely" target="_blank" title="ad.绝对地；确实">absolutely unimportant

to my mind, and, I think I may add, to that of Mr. Browning's sister and son.
The poet and his father were what we know them, and if negro blood

had any part in their composition, it was no worse for them,
and so much the better for the negro. But many persons among us