"I am much disappointed in it," wrote Dante Rossetti to Allingham, "and shall advise its non-exhibition." A second portrait painted at this time--that by Fisher--is familiar to us through a reproduction in the second volume of _The Letters of Mrs Browning_.

A rash act of the morning of the day on which he entered Rome had deplorably altered Browning's appearance.

In what his wife calls a fit of suicidal impatience, he perpetrated the high crime and misdemeanour, and appeared before her wholly unworthy of portraiture with clean-shaven cheeks and chin.

"I cried when I saw him," she tells his sister, "I was so horror-struck." To mark the sin, his beard, when once again he recovered his good looks, was gray, but Mrs Browning cherished the opinion that the argentine touch, as she terms it, gave "a character of elevation and thought to his whole physiognomy." To complete this history, it may be added that in 1859 the moustache of his later portraits was first doubtfully permitted and was presently approved with decision as picturesque.[58] Under all disadvantages of appearance Browning made his way triumphantly in the English and American society of Rome.

The studios were open to him.