relation with the Greeks. When he was looking that morning on the statue of Nikê, the original of which stands at the head of the great staircase in the Louvre, it seemed to him that it ought to be the figure of one who stood on the prow of the ship which brought the news of the victory of Salamis. It was not by any means certain, mixed race that we were, that the existence of a museum like that at Cambridge would not stir in some one an ancestral vigor, some hereditary quality or faculty that should make him into an artist. ✠ IV. ON ROBERT BROWNING. The fashion of this world passed away, but the fashion of those things which belonged to the world of imagination--and it was most emphatically in that world that Mr. Browning had worked--endured and never passed. In 1848 Mr. Browning said in a preface to a collection of his poems that many of them were out of print and of the rest a great number had been withdrawn from circulation, which implied that even at that time the size of his public was very small. But he had fully demonstrated that he stood in no need of a Browning Society to reinforce his native vigor, for, in spite of the indifference of the public, he had constantly gone on, from that time to this, producing and deepening the impression which he had made upon all thinking minds. It had been said that he had no sense of form, but this question depended upon the meaning to be attached to that word. One thing he thought was certain, and that was that men who had discussed form most, as for instance Goethe, had not always been the most successful in producing examples of it. Certainly no one with any sense of form could call “Faust” other than formless. If form meant the use of adequate and harmonious means to produce a certain artistic end, then he knew no one who had given truer examples of it than the great poet after whom that society took its name. He thought there was one danger in a Browning Society, which was that it might lead them to be partisans, and he thought he had seen some symptoms of it. They might be apt to insist upon people admiring the inferior work of the artist with his better work, and this he thought would be an evil. Every one who read Browning with attention, and who loved him, must at the same time admit that he was occasionally whirled away by the sweep and torrent of his own abundance. But after making these deductions, there was no poet who had given us a greater variety or who had shown more originality. Mr. Browning abided with them. He was not a fashion, nor did he belong to any one period of their lives. What they felt more clearly than anything else was his strength. He was of all others a masculine, a virile poet.