At any rate I am encouraged to thank Miss Fisher and Miss Garrow
for their visits of repeated inquiry, and their other very kind
attentions, by these written words, rather than by a message. For I am
sure that wherever kindness _can_ come thankfulness _may_, and that
whatever intrusion my note can be guilty of, it is excusable by the
fact of my being Miss Garrow's
"Sincerely obliged,
"E. BARRETT."
* * * * *
Could anything be more charmingly girlish, or more prettily worded!
The diminutive little note seems to have been preserved, an almost
solitary survival of the memorials of the days to which it belongs.
It must doubtless have been followed by sundry others, but was, I
suppose, specially treasured as having been the first step towards a
friendship which was already highly valued.
Of course, in the recollections of an Englishman living during those
years in Florence, Robert Browning must necessarily stand out in high
relief, and in the foremost line. But very obviously this is neither
the time nor the place, nor is my dose of presumption sufficient for
any attempt at a delineation of the man. To speak of the poet, since
I write for Englishmen, would be very superfluous. It may be readily
imagined that the "tag-rag and bobtail" of the men who mainly
constituted that very pleasant but not very intellectual society, were
not likely to be such as Mr.
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