Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/259

 ROBERT BROWNING 191 The whole of London life the life of the streets, of the city, of the middle class seems at first sight depicted in this gallery. Here are merchant, shop- keeper and clerk, lawyer and client, money-lender and victim, dressmaker, actor one knows not what. Yet there are great omissions. The scholar, the divine, the statesman, the country gentleman, are absent, partly because Dickens had no knowledge of them, and partly because he forbore to hold them up to the ridicule which he loved to pour over his characters. His methods imposed upon him certain limitations ; he aimed at commanding his reader's attention by compelling laughter and tears, but especially laughter. He who can command neither the one nor the other is no true artist in fiction. But in his laughter and in his tears one feels always the kindly heart as well as the skilful hand. It is for the former i for the deeply human heart even more than for the latter, that the world will continue to love the memory of Charles Dickens. ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889) Robert Browning was born in 181 2, at Camberwell, England. His father was a clerk highly placed in the house of Rothschild, and there are still living those who remember the excitement of the elder man and of his friends in New Court, when the time came for the son's first play to be produced at Covent Garden. He was a Dissenter, and for this reason his son's education did not proceed on the ordinary English lines. The training which Robert Browning received was more individual, and his reading was wider and less accurate, than would have been the case had he gone to Eton or Winchester. Thus, though to the end he read Greek with the deepest interest, he never could be called a Greek scholar. His poetic turn declared itself rather early, and in 1835 he had a poem, "Pauline," ready for the press. But publication costs money, and his business-like father did not see any chance of returns from poetry. A kind aunt, however, came to