. . . They always treat me gently in 'Punch'--why don't you do the same by the Browning Society? I see you emphasize Miss Hickey's acknowledgement of defects in time and want of rehearsal: but I look for no great perfection in a number of kindly disposed strangers to me personally, who try to interest people in my poems by singing and reading them. They give their time for nothing, offer their little entertainment for nothing, and certainly get next to nothing in the way of thanks--unless from myself who feel grateful to the faces I shall never see, the voices I shall never hear. The kindest notices I have had, or at all events those that have given me most pleasure, have been educed by this Society--A. Sidgwick's paper, that of Professor Corson, Miss Lewis' article in this month's 'Macmillan'--and I feel grateful for it all, for my part,--and none the less for a little amusement at the wonder of some of my friends that I do not jump up and denounce the practices which must annoy me so much. Oh! my 'gentle Shakespeare', how well you felt and said--'never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it.' So, dear Lady, here is my duty and simplicity tendering itself to you, with all affection besides, and I being ever yours, R. Browning. That general disposition of the London world which left the ranks of the little Society to be three-fourths recruited among persons, many living at a distance, whom the poet did not know, became also in its way a satisfaction. It was with him a matter of course, though never of indifference, that his closer friends of both sexes were among its members; it was one of real gratification that they included from the beginning such men as Dean Boyle of Salisbury, the Rev. Llewellyn Davies, George Meredith, and James Cotter Morison--that they enjoyed the sympathy and co-operation of such a one as Archdeacon Farrar. But he had an ingenuous pride in reading the large remainder of the Society's lists of names, and pointing out the fact that there was not one among them which he had ever heard. It was equivalent to saying, 'All these people care for me as a poet. No social interest, no personal prepossession, has attracted them to my work.' And when the unknown name was not only appended to a list; when it formed the signature of a paper--excellent or indifferent as might be--but in either case bearing witness to a careful and unobtrusive study of his poems, by so much was the gratification increased. He seldom weighed the intrinsic merit of such productions; he did not read them critically. No man was ever more adverse to the seeming ungraciousness of analyzing the quality of a gift. In real life indeed this power of gratitude sometimes defeated its own end, by neutralizing his insight into the motive or effort involved in different acts of kindness, and placing them all successively on the same plane.