He had won the Newdigate.

The subject was Andrea del Sarto, one of my favourite painters--il pittore senza errore--and his prize poem--it had, of course, to be academic in form--was excellent.

It said just the things about him which Browning somehow missed, and which I had always been impotently wanting to say.
And a year or so afterwards--when I praised his poem--he would shrink in a more than deprecating attitude: I might just as well have extolled him for seducing the wife of his dearest friend.

His later poems, of which he was immodestly proud--"Sensations Captured on the Wing," he defined them--left me cold and unsympathetic.

So, for these reasons, the boy and I had drifted apart.