It must have been on his return journey that Mr. Browning went to Leghorn to see Edward John Trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of introduction. He described the interview long afterwards to Mr. Val Prinsep, but chiefly in his impressions of the cool courage which Mr. Trelawney had displayed during its course. A surgeon was occupied all the time in probing his leg for a bullet which had been lodged there some years before, and had lately made itself felt; and he showed himself absolutely indifferent to the pain of the operation. Mr. Browning's main object in paying the visit had been, naturally, to speak with one who had known Byron and been the last to see Shelley alive; but we only hear of the two poets that they formed in part the subject of their conversation. He reached England, again, we suppose, through Germany--since he avoided Paris as before. It has been asserted by persons otherwise well informed, that on this, if not on his previous Italian journey, Mr. Browning became acquainted with Stendhal, then French Consul at Civita Vecchia, and that he imbibed from the great novelist a taste for curiosities of Italian family history, which ultimately led him in the direction of the Franceschini case. It is certain that he profoundly admired this writer, and if he was not, at some time or other, introduced to him it was because the opportunity did not occur. But there is abundant evidence that no introduction took place, and quite sufficient proof that none was possible. Stendhal died in Paris in March 1842; and granting that he was at Civita Vecchia when the poet made his earlier voyage--no certainty even while he held the appointment--the ship cannot have touched there on its way to Trieste. It is also a mistake to suppose that Mr. Browning was specially interested in ancient chronicles, as such. This was one of the points on which he distinctly differed from his father. He took his dramatic subjects wherever he found them, and any historical research which they ultimately involved was undertaken for purposes of verification. 'Sordello' alone may have been conceived on a rather different plan, and I have no authority whatever for admitting that it was so. The discovery of the record of the Franceschini case was, as its author has everywhere declared, an accident. A single relic exists for us of this visit to the South--a shell picked up, according to its inscription, on one of the Syren Isles, October 4, 1844; but many of its reminiscences are embodied in that vivid and charming picture 'The Englishman in Italy', which appeared in the 'Bells and Pomegranates' number for the following year. Naples always remained a bright spot in the poet's memory; and if it had been, like Asolo, his first experience of Italy, it must have drawn him in later years the more powerfully of the two. At one period, indeed, he dreamed of it as a home for his declining days. Chapter 9 1844-1849