Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of the intellectual.
Browning was now famous, _Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, Christmas Eve_, and _Dramatis Personae_ had successively glorified his Italian period.

But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more famous things.

He has himself left on record a description of the incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest achievement.

In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every variety of utility and uselessness:-- "picture frames White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped, Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests, (Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade) Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!) A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web When reds and blues were indeed red and blue, Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet (Since carpets constitute a cruel cost).
* * * * * Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools, 'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody, Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'-- With this, one glance at the lettered back of which, And 'Stall,' cried I; a _lira_ made it mine." This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of _debris_, and comes nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop.

"This," which Browning bought for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the murder of his wife Pompilia in the year 1698.