Chapter 3 - Page 2

among the mammas, who were sure there was not fair play. Mrs.----was
neglecting her other pupils for the sake of 'bringing on Master
Browning;' and the poor lady found it necessary to discourage Master
Browning's attendance lest she should lose the remainder of her flock.
This, at least, was the story as he himself remembered it. According to
Miss Browning his instructress did not yield without a parting shot.
She retorted on the discontented parents that, if she could give their
children 'Master Browning's intellect', she would have no difficulty
in satisfying them. After this came the interlude of home-teaching, in
which all his elementary knowledge must have been gained. As an older
child he was placed with two Misses Ready, who prepared boys for
entering their brother's (the Rev. Thomas Ready's) school; and in due
time he passed into the latter, where he remained up to the age of
fourteen.

He seems in those early days to have had few playmates beyond his
sister, two years younger than himself, and whom his irrepressible
spirit must sometimes have frightened or repelled. Nor do we hear
anything of childish loves; and though an entry appeared in his diary
one Sunday in about the seventh or eighth year of his age, 'married two
wives this morning,' it only referred to a vague imaginary appropriation
of two girls whom he had just seen in church, and whose charm probably
lay in their being much bigger than he. He was, however, capable of a
self-conscious shyness in the presence of even a little girl; and his
sense of certain proprieties was extraordinarily keen. He told a friend
that on one occasion, when the merest child, he had edged his way by the
wall from one point of his bedroom to another, because he was not fully
clothed, and his reflection in the glass could otherwise have been seen
through the partly open door.*

* Another anecdote, of a very different kind, belongs to an
earlier period, and to that category of pure naughtiness
which could not fail to be sometimes represented in the
conduct of so gifted a child. An old lady who visited his
mother, and was characterized in the family as 'Aunt Betsy',
had irritated him by pronouncing the word 'lovers' with the
contemptuous jerk which the typical old maid is sometimes
apt to impart to it, when once the question had arisen why a
certain 'Lovers' Walk' was so called. He was too nearly a
baby to imagine what a 'lover' was; he supposed the name
denoted a trade or occupation. But his human sympathy
resented Aunt Betsy's manner as an affront; and he
determined, after probably repeated provocation, to show her
something worse than a 'lover', whatever this might be. So
one night he slipped out of bed, exchanged his nightgown for
what he