Robert Browning had an amusing experience on one occasion toward the close of his life. He was walking through the residential district of London's fashionable West End to a meeting which he had been invited to attend. Mistaking the house, he walked into a literary gathering that was discussing his own poems. Presently he rose to his feet and offered a few suggestions as to the meaning of a rather difficult passage. Now Browning was not at all like a poet in appearance, but rather resembled a prosperous business man, and it happened that as he was well toward the back of the hall no one recognized him. On the contrary his suggestions were ridiculed by other critics who took the floor when he sat down and he retired unrecognized but vastly delighted. Of course some of Browning's work is intensely intricate and confused; he himself said of his early poem "Sordello" that once there were two beings who understood it, the Almighty and Robert Browning; now, he added, there was but one, for Browning had long lost the key to its problem. Charles Dickens was one of the most impressionable writers who ever lived. His characters were absolutely real to him and when he was writing he would impersonate the various characters he was describing, talking, making faces, jumping up and looking in the mirror, and then dashing back to his desk to set down each inspiration. But his impressionable nature prevented complete happiness; he was either intensely happy or down in the dumps and miserable. This made him very hard to get along with, so that it is no wonder that his wife found it almost impossible to live with him. Gladstone, the 'Grand Old Man' of English politics in the last century, was a scholar and a linguist as well as a statesman. On one occasion he was seated in the House of Commons while his bitter opponent, the clever Disraeli, was delivering a venomous and brilliant attack upon him. During the speech Gladstone was observed to be writing on a scrap of paper, apparently taking notes for his reply. At the conclusion of his enemy's speech Gladstone rose and delivered a most masterly refutation of the attack, answering and breaking down each point of Disraeli's invective with the utmost skill. A member sitting near by noticed that the scrap of paper was lying on Gladstone's seat and picked it up to see what the notes were like; to his surprise they consisted of a careful translation of "Rock of Ages" into smooth Greek verse, which the orator had made half-consciously while waiting for the occasion to reply to his opponent.