Browning’s unfailing courtesy towards women could sometimes display itself in a partly humorous fashion. One day when he was calling upon my wife, an authoress whose high estimate of her own work was never quite confirmed by the public, was suddenly announced. The visit was somewhat embarrassing, for the lady had sent my wife one of her novels, with a request that, when she had read it, it might be submitted to me with a view to its being adapted for the stage. The book had not been read, had in fact been mislaid, but as this was the second occasion upon which the lady had applied for my verdict, my wife basely resorted to prevarication, and embarked upon general phrases of eulogy in regard to the high merit of the work in question. This subterfuge, however, only resulted in deeper disaster, for the flattered authoress at once plunged into baffling details that lay beyond the reach of my wife’s improvised mendacity. It happened, however, that Browning had read the book, and, realising the situation, at once came to the rescue, and finally succeeded in persuading the unhappy authoress that the very merits of the novel were in themselves an insuperable obstacle to its production on the stage. One thing remains vividly in my recollection of Browning, and that was his constant expression of loyal admiration for the genius of Tennyson. I have heard him bear witness to it again and again, and always with entire sincerity. There was about him in his outlook on life, in his high courtesy and in his unflagging faith in the beauty of the world, a quality that I sometimes find lacking in gifted men of a younger generation. I can only express what I feel in this sense by reference to a splendid survivor of the great race--George Meredith. To those who do not instinctively feel it, my reference may mean nothing, but to me, to whom the whole achievement of the Victorian Era, in art as in literature, stands high, it means everything. It is not my purpose in these pages of personal recollections to dwell upon my intimate association with men who are still living, but in Mr. Meredith I feel I may make an exception. And Browning has reminded me of him because there is in both a kindred quality--the quality of a superb reverence for life, an undying faith in its ultimate beauty. As literature has fallen since under the conduct of later hands, I find that it seems in some sense shattered in subdivision. There are, on the one hand, writers who seek to be artists and no more, men who pet and polish their rhythmic phrases till they may be said to have reached perfection, and on the other hand there are pamphleteers, eager and sincere, but still pamphleteers, who are content if they can coerce their readers into the belief that their chosen gospel for the regeneration of humanity is a fair equivalent for the larger vision of life itself. No man who is richly human can escape that yearning towards a brighter social ideal. Browning and Tennyson,