Chapter 5 - Page 2

let me know their safe arrival by a line to R. B.
junior, Hanover Cottage, Southampton Street, Camberwell. You must not
think me too encroaching, if I make the getting back 'Rosalind and
Helen' an excuse for calling on you some evening--the said 'R. and
H.' has, I observe, been well thumbed and sedulously marked by an
acquaintance of mine, but I have not time to rub out his labour of love.
I am, dear sir, Yours very really, R. Browning. Camberwell: 2 o'clock.

At the left-hand corner of the first page of this note is written: 'The
parcel--a "Pauline" parcel--is come. I send one as a witness.'

On the inner page is written:

'Impromptu on hearing a sermon by the Rev. T. R.--pronounced "heavy"--

'A _heavy_ sermon!--sure the error's great, For not a word Tom uttered
_had its weight_.'

A third letter, also undated, but post-marked March 29, 1833, refers
probably to the promise or announcement of a favourable notice. A fourth
conveys Mr. Browning's thanks for the notice itself:

My dear Sir,--I have just received your letter, which I am desirous of
acknowledging before any further mark of your kindness reaches me;--I
can only offer you my simple thanks--but they are of the sort that one
can give only once or twice in a life: all things considered, I think
you are almost repaid, if you imagine what I must feel--and it will have
been worth while to have made a fool of myself, only to have obtained a
'case' which leaves my fine fellow Mandeville at a dead lock.

As for the book--I hope ere long to better it, and to deserve your
goodness.

In the meantime I shall not forget the extent to which I am, dear sir,
Your most obliged and obedient servant R. B. S. & O.'s, Conduit St.,
Thursday m-g.

I must intrude on your attention, my dear sir, once more than I had
intended--but a notice like the one I have read will have its effect at
all hazards.

I can only say that I am very proud to feel as grateful as I do, and
not altogether hopeless of justifying, by effort at least, your most
generous 'coming forward'. Hazlitt wrote his essays, as he somewhere
tells us, mainly to send them to some one in the country who had 'always
prophesied he would be something'!--I shall never write a line without
thinking of the source of my first praise, be assured. I am, dear sir,
Yours most truly and obliged, Robert Browning. March 31, 1833.

Mr. Fox was then editor of a periodical called the 'Monthly Repository',
which, as his daughter, Mrs. Bridell-Fox, writes in her graceful
article on Robert Browning, in the 'Argosy' for February 1890, he was
endeavouring to raise from its original denominational character into
a first-class literary and political journal.