CHAPTER XII.
The Ring and the Book The publication of _Dramatis Personae_ marks an advance in Browning's growing popularity; a second edition, in which some improvements were effected, was called for in 1864, the year of its first publication.
"All my new cultivators," Browning wrote, "are young men"; many of them belonged to Oxford and Cambridge.

But he was resolved to consult his own taste, to take his own way, and let popularity delay or hasten as it would--"pleasing myself," he says, "or aiming at doing so, and thereby, I hope, pleasing God." His life had ordered itself as seemed best to him--a life in London during the months in which the tide flows and sparkles; then summer and autumn quietude in some retreat upon the French coast.

The years passed in such a uniformity of work and rest, with enjoyment accompanying each of these, that they may almost be grasped in bundles.

In 1865, the holiday was again at Sainte-Marie, and the weather was golden; but he noticed with regret that the old church at Pornic, where the beautiful white girl of his poem had been buried, was disappearing to give space in front of a new and smart erection of brick and stucco.

His Florence, as he learnt, was also altering, and he lamented the change.