Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol I (1901).djvu/375

 At the same time be made a close study of Euripides, which left a strong mark on his future work, and he saw through the press the 'Last Poems' of his wife, to which he prefixed a dedication 'to grateful Florence.' In October he returned by Paris to London.

On reappearing in London he was pestered by applications from volunteer biographers of his wife. His anguish at these impertinences disturbed his peace and even his health. On this subject his indignation remained to the last extreme, and the expressions of it were sometimes unwisely violent. 'Nothing that ought to be published shall be kept back,' however, he determined, and therefore in the course of 1863 he published Mrs. Browning's prose essays on 'The Greek Christian Poets.' His own poems appeared this year in two forms: a selection, edited by John Forster and Barry Cornwall, and a three-volume edition, relatively complete.

Up to this time the Procters (Barry Cornwall and his wife) were almost the only company he kept outside his family circle. But with the spring of 1863 a great change came over his habits. He had refused all invitations into society; but now, of evenings, after he had put his boy to bed, the solitude weighed intolerably upon him. He told the present writer, long afterwards, that it suddenly occurred to him on one such spring night in 1863 that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy, and, then and there, he determined to accept for the future every suitable invitation which came to him. Accordingly he began to dine out, and in the process of time he grew to be one of the most familiar figures of the age at every dining-table, concert-hall, and place of refined entertainment in London. This, however, was a slow process. In 1803, 1864, and 1865 Browning spent the summer at Sainte-Marie, near Pornic, 'a wild little place in Brittany,' by which he was singularly soothed and refreshed. Here he wrote most of the 'Dramatis Personse.' Early in 1864 he privately printed, as a pamphlet, 'Gold Hair : a legend of Pornic,' and later, as a volume, the important volume of 'Dramatis Personæ,' containing some of the finest and most characteristic of his work. In this year (12 Feb.) Browning's will was signed in the presence of Tennyson and F. T. Palgrave, He never modified it. Through these years his constant occupation was his 'great venture, the murder-poem,' which was now gradually taking shape as 'The Ring and the Book.' In September 1865 he was occupied in making a selection from Mrs. Browning's poems, whose fame and sale continued greatly to exceed his own, although he was now at length beginning to be widely read. In June 1866 he was telegraphed for to Paris, and arrived in time to be with his father when he died (14 June). On the 19th he returned to London, bringing his sister with him. For the remainder of his life she kept house for him. They left almost immediately for Dinard, and passed on to Le Croisic, a little town near the mouth of the Loire, which delighted Browning exceedingly. Here he took 'the most delicious and peculiar old house I ever occupied, the oldest in the town; plenty of great rooms.' It was here that he wrote the ballad of 'Hervé Riel' (September 1867) which was published four years later. During 1866 and 1867 Browning greatly enjoyed Le Croisic. In June 1868 Arabel Barrett died in Browning's arms. She had been his wife's favourite sister, and the one who resembled her most in character and temperament. Her death caused the poet long distress, and for many years he was careful never to pass her house in Delamere Terrace. In June of this year he was made an hon. M.A, of Oxford, and in October honorary fellow of Balliol College, mainly through the friendship of Jowett. At the death of J. S. Mill, in 1868, Browning was asked if he would take the lord-rectorship of St. Andrews University, but he did not feel himself justified in accepting any duties which would involve vague but considerable extra expenditure.

In 1868 Messrs. Smith, Elder, & Co. became Browning's publishers, and with Mr. George Smith the poet formed a close friendship which lasted until his death. The firm of Smith, Elder, & Co. issued in 1868 a six volume edition of Browing's works, and in November-December 1868, January-February 1869, they published, in four successive monthly instalments, 'The Ring and the Book.' Browning presented the manuscript to Mr. Smith. The history of this, the longest and most imposing of Browning's works, appears to be as follows. In June 1860 he had discovered in the Piazza San Lorenzo, Florence, a parchment-bound proces-verbal of a Roman murder case, 'the entire criminal cause of Guido Franceschini, and four cut-throats in his pay,' executed for their crimes in 1698. He bought this volume for eight-pence, read it through with intense and absorbed attention, and immediately perceived the extraordinary value of its group of parallel studies in psychology. He proposed it to Miss Ogle as the subject of a prose romance, and 'for poetic use to one of his leading contemporaries'. It was not until after his wife's death that he