The attention of Mr W.J. Fox, a Unitarian minister of note, had been directed to Browning's early unpublished verse by Miss Flower. In the _Monthly Repository_ (April 1833) which he then edited, Mr Fox wrote of _Pauline_ with admiration, and Browning was duly grateful for this earliest public recognition of his genius as a poet. In the _Athenaeum_ Allen Cunningham made an effort to be appreciative and sympathetic. John Stuart Mill desired to be the reviewer of _Pauline_ in _Taifs Magazine_; there, however, the poem had been already dismissed with one contemptuous phrase. It found few readers, but the admiration of one of these, who discovered _Pauline_ many years later, was a sufficient compensation for the general indifference or neglect. "When Mr Browning was living in Florence, he received a letter from a young painter whose name was quite unknown to him, asking him whether he were the author of a poem called _Pauline_, which was somewhat in his manner, and which the writer had so greatly admired that he had transcribed the whole of it in the British Museum reading-room. The letter was signed D.G. Rossetti, and thus began Mr Browning's acquaintance with this eminent man."[14] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: By Dr Furnivall; see _The Academy_, April 12, 1902.] [Footnote 2: "Letters of R.B. and E.B.B.," ii. 477.] [Footnote 3: Letter of R.B. to E.B.B.] [Footnote 4: Dr Moncure Conway states that Browning told him that the original name of the family was De Buri. According to Mrs Orr, Browning "neither claimed nor disclaimed the more remote genealogical past which had presented itself as a certainty to some older members of his family."] [Footnote 5: Quoted by Mr Sharp in his "Life of Browning," p. 21, _n_., from Mrs Fraser Cockran.] [Footnote 6: "Autobiography of a Journalist," i. 277.] [Footnote 7: For my quotations and much of the above information I am indebted to Mr F. Herbert Stead, Warden of the Robert Browning Settlement, Walworth. In Robert Browning Hall are preserved the baptismal registers of Robert (June 14th, 1812), and Sarah Anna Browning, with other documents from which I have quoted.] [Footnote 8: _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B_., i. 528, 529; and (for Ossian), ii. 469.] [Footnote 9: Browning in a letter to Mr Wise says that this happened "some time before 1830 (or even earlier). The books," he says, "were obtained in the _regular way_, from Hunt and Clarke." Mr Gosse in _Personalia_ gives a different account, pp. 23, 24.] [Footnote 10: The quotations from letters above are taken from J.C. Hadden's article "Some Friends of Browning" in _Macmillan's Magazine_, Jan. 1898.]