Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/20

viii lished, however, and Browning's testimony for 1806, instead of 1809, is substantiated by the discovery in the parish register of Kelloe Church, Durham county, of the following entry:

Coxhoe Hall was the residence of Mr. Barrett's only brother, Samuel, at one time member of Parliament for Richmond, Mr. Barrett himself having married before he was twenty-one and not having established himself independently as yet in a land whereto he was not born.

England's New World colony of Jamaica, with its slave-holding customs and a measure of the affluence and command of opportunity belonging to landed proprietorship in tropical seas,—a commingled good and ill to a poet-soul,—lay in the immediate background of Elizabeth Barrett's family as also in that of Robert Browning's. He it is who tells how his wife's father, the heir to estates bequeathed from his grandfather, whose name of Barrett he added to his own, was brought to England on the early death of his father, as the ward of the late Chief Baron Lord Abinger, then Mr. Scarlett, whom the boy frequently accompanied in his post-chaise when on circuit, and by whom he was sent to Harrow, and at sixteen to Cambridge. Thence he went to Northumberland, where he married Miss Mary Graham-Clarke, of Fenham Hall, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Durham apparently counted for little in Elizabeth's life, since the family was living in London shortly after