His unworldliness had not a flaw."[6] To Dante Rossetti he appeared, as an old man, "lovable beyond description," with that "submissive yet highly cheerful simplicity of character which often ...

appears in the family of a great man, who uses at last what the others have kept for him." He is, Rossetti continues, "a complete oddity--with a real genius for drawing--but caring for nothing in the least except Dutch boors,--fancy, the father of Browning!--and as innocent as a child." Browning himself declared that he had not one artistic taste in common with his father--"in pictures, he goes 'souls away' to Brauwer, Ostade, Teniers ...

he would turn from the Sistine Altar-piece to these--in music he desiderates a tune 'that has a story connected with it.'" Yet Browning inherited much from his father, and was ready to acknowledge his gains.
In _Development_, one of the poems of his last volume, he recalls his father's sportive way of teaching him at five years old, with the aid of piled-up chairs and tables--the cat for Helen, and Towzer and Tray as the Atreidai,--the story of the siege of Troy, and, later, his urging the boy to read the tale "properly told" in the translation of Homer by his favourite poet, Pope.

He lived almost to the close of his eighty-fifth year, and if he was at times bewildered by his son's poetry, he came nearer to it in intelligent sympathy as he grew older, and he had for long the satisfaction of enjoying his son's fame.
The attachment of Robert Browning to his mother--"the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman," said Carlyle--was deep and intimate.

For him she was, in his own phrase, "a divine woman"; her death in 1849 was to Browning almost an overwhelming blow.