Browning; he went to his spacious box at the Goldoni evening after evening, and did not fail to express his thanks to his "brother dramatist" for the enjoyment he had received. In his _Toccata of Galuppi_ he had expressed the melancholy which underlies the transitory gaiety of eighteenth-century life in Venice; but he could also remember its innocent gladnesses without this sense of melancholy. When in 1883 the committee of the Goldoni monument asked Browning to contribute a poem to their Album he immediately complied with the request. It was "scribbled off," according to Mrs Orr, while Professor Molmenti's messenger was waiting; it was ready the day after the request reached him, says Mrs Bronson, and was probably "carefully thought out before he put pen to paper." It catches, in the happiest temper, the spirit of Goldoni's sunniest plays: There throng the People: how they come and go, Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb--see-- On Piazza, Calle, under Portico And over Bridge! Dear King of Comedy, Be honoured! Thou that didst love Venice so, Venice, and we who love her, all love thee! The brightness and lightness of southern life soothed Browning's northern strenuousness of mood. He would enumerate of a morning the crimes of "the wicked city" as revealed by the reports of the public press--a gondolier's oars had been conveyed away, a piece of linen a-dry had corrupted the virtue of some lightfingered Autolycus of the canals![140] Yet all the while much of his heart remained with his native land. He could not be happy without his London daily paper; Mrs Orr tells us how deeply interested he was in the fortunes of the British expedition for the relief of General Gordon.