He died in 1833. His wife, to whom he was married in or about 1780,
was one Margaret Morris Tittle, a Creole, born in the West Indies.
Her portrait, by Wright of Derby, used to hang in the poet's dining-room.
They resided, Mr. R. Barrett Browning tells me, in Battersea,
where his grandfather was their first-born. The paternal grandfather
of the poet decided that his three sons, Robert, William Shergold, and Reuben,
should go into business, the two younger in London, the elder abroad.
All three became efficient financial clerks, and attained to good positions
and fair means.* The eldest, Robert, was a man of exceptional powers.
He was a poet, both in sentiment and expression; and he understood,
as well as enjoyed, the excellent in art. He was a scholar, too,
in a reputable fashion: not indifferent to what he had learnt in his youth,
nor heedless of the high opinion generally entertained for the greatest
writers of antiquity, but with a particular care himself for Horace
and Anacreon. As his son once told a friend, "The old gentleman's brain
was a storehouse of literary and philosophical antiquities.
He was completely versed in mediaeval legend, and seemed to have known
Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages, personally" --
a significant detail, by the way. He was fond of metrical composition,
and his ease and grace in the use of the heroic couplet were the admiration,
not only of his intellectual associates, but, in later days, of his son,
who was wont to affirm, certainly in all seriousness,
that expressionally his father was a finer poetic artist than himself.
Some one has recorded of him that he was an authority
on the Letters of Junius: fortunately he had more tangible claims than this
to the esteem of his fellows. It was his boast that,
notwithstanding the exigencies of his vocation, he knew as much
of the history of art as any professional critic. His extreme modesty
is deducible from this naive remark. He was an amateur artist, moreover,
as well as poet, critic, and student. I have seen several of his drawings