In the meantime many outward circumstances conspired to promote the "advance" which every line of it foretold.

His old mentor of the _Incondita_ days, W.J.Fox, in some sort a Browningite before Browning, reviewed _Pauline_ in _The Monthly Repository_ (April 1833) with generous but discerning praise.

This was the beginning of a warm friendship between the two, which ended only with Fox's death.

It was founded upon hearty admiration on both sides, and no man living was better qualified to scatter the morbid films that clung about the expanding genius of young Browning than this robust and masculine critic and preacher.

A few months later came an event of which we know very little, but which at least did much to detach him from the limited horizons of Camberwell.