However this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr.Ready, at which again he was marked chiefly by precocity.

But the boy's education did not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediaeval chronicles.

If we test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history.

But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated.

In a spirited poem he has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy.
Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of knowledge--knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the Provencal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages.