Dear Professor Knight,--I have seemed to neglect your commission shamefully enough: but I confess to a sort of repugnance to classifying the poems as even good and less good: because in my heart I fear I should do it almost chronologically--so immeasureably superior seem to me the 'first sprightly runnings'. Your selection would appear to be excellent; and the partial admittance of the later work prevents one from observing the too definitely distinguishing black line between supremely good and--well, what is fairly tolerable--from Wordsworth, always understand! I have marked a few of the early poems, not included in your list--I could do no other when my conscience tells me that I never can be tired of loving them: while, with the best will in the world, I could never do more than try hard to like them.* * By 'them' Mr. Browning clearly means the later poems, and probably has omitted a few words which would have shown this. You see, I go wholly upon my individual likings and distastes: that other considerations should have their weight with other people is natural and inevitable. Ever truly yours, Robert Browning. Many thanks for the volume just received--that with the correspondence. I hope that you restore the swan simile so ruthlessly cut away from 'Dion'. In 1884 he was again invited, and again declined, to stand for the Lord Rectorship of the University of St. Andrews. In the same year he received the LL.D. degree of the University of Edinburgh; and in the following was made Honorary President of the Associated Societies of that city.* During the few days spent there on the occasion of his investiture, he was the guest of Professor Masson, whose solicitous kindness to him is still warmly remembered in the family. * This Association was instituted in 1833, and is a union of literary and debating societies. It is at present composed of five: the Dialectic, Scots Law, Diagnostic, Philosophical, and Philomathic.