Although, as has been said, the popularity of Lord Tennyson itself was not a plant of very rapid growth, and though but a short time before his position was undisputed it was admitted only by a minority, imposing in quality but far from strong in mere numbers, his chief rival during the latter part of their joint lives was vastly slower in gaining the public ear. It is not quite pleasant to think that the well-merited but comparatively accidental distinction of the Laureateship perhaps did more even for Tennyson in this respect than the intrinsic value of his work. Robert Browning had no such aid, his verse was even more abhorrent than Tennyson's to the tradition of the elders, and until he found a sort of back-way to please, he was even more indifferent to pleasing. So that while Tennyson became in a manner popular soon after 1850, two decades more had to pass before anything that could be called popularity came to Browning. It is, though the actual dates are well enough known to most people, still something of a surprise to remember that at that time he had been writing for very nearly forty years, and that his first book, though a little later than Tennyson's, actually appeared before the death of Coleridge and not more than a few months after that of Scott. Browning, about whose ancestry and parentage a good deal of mostly superfluous ink has been shed, was born, the son of a city man, on 7th May 1812, in the, according to the elder Mr. Weller, exceptional district of Camberwell. He was himself exceptional enough in more ways than one. His parents had means; but Browning did not receive the ordinary education of a well-to-do Englishman at school and college, and his learning, though sufficiently various, was privately obtained. _Pauline_, his first poem, appeared in 1833, but had been written about two years earlier. He did not reprint it in the first general collection of his verse, nor till after his popularity had been established; and it cannot be said to be of great intrinsic excellence. But it was distinctly characteristic:--first, in a strongly dramatic tone and strain without regular dramatic form; secondly, in a peculiar fluency of decasyllabic verse that could not be directly traced to any model; and, thirdly, in a certain quality of thought, which in later days for a long time received, and never entirely lost from the vulgar, the name of "obscurity," but which perhaps might be more justly termed breathlessness--the expression, if not the conception, of a man who either did not stop at all to pick his words, or was only careful to pick them out of the first choice that presented itself to him of something not commonplace.