Life and Letters of Robert Browning | Page 3

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 vigorous constitution,
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 indistinct impression 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 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