Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/79

 It is easier and less invidious to talk about a row of volumes than a living man. I think of Mr. Browning as one who has stopped to speak to many of my friends, and I am more doubtful than ever about the beginning of this essay. I remember with sympathy Coleridge at Birmingham, when he was wakened up suddenly by the question whether he had seen a newspaper that day: 'Sir,' I replied, rubbing my eyes, 'I am far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read newspapers'—though he had come to the place to push the sale of his own paper, the Watchman; his remark, as he says, was incongruous with that purpose, but still, it may have expressed his true mind.

On the other hand, it is very pleasant to think of Mr. Browning 'as he strikes a contemporary'. I remember a gathering at Balliol, now about thirty years since, and the guests of the college as they met there, and Browning talking to Matthew Arnold at the foot of the steps of the hall; and, before that, an autumn evening in the Island of Arran, the year that Pacchiarotto was published, when Browning met us on the Lamlash Road going home, and I provoked some scepticism in my companions by saying that he was the greatest man in the world.

That was a long time ago, and I am reminded, thinking of the dates, what a difference there is in the perspective of the history of poetry between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century. Browning, who died in 1889, is at nearly the same distance from us in 1910 as Dr. Johnson from the generation that read Marmion. But the interval seems much less. The nineteenth century is much nearer to us than the eighteenth century to our ancestors a hundred years ago. We think of Fielding and Gray as very far back in time, far separated from the age of Scott and Byron. Yet they are as near that time, in dates, as Thackeray to us, and nearer than the early poems of Tennyson and Browning, which are still read by many young people, without com-