In 1871 he was elected a Life Governor of the University of London.

In 1868 he was invited to stand, with the certainty of election, for the Lord Rectorship of the University of St Andrews, as successor to John Stuart Mill, an honour which he declined.[96] The great event of this year in the history of his authorship was the publication in November and December of the first two volumes of _The Ring and the Book_.

The two remaining volumes followed in January and February 1869.
[Illustration: PIAZZA DI SAN LORENZO, FLORENCE, WHERE "THE BOOK" WAS FOUND BY BROWNING.
_From a photograph by_ ALINARI.] In June 1860 Browning lighted, among the litter of odds and ends exposed for sale in the Piazza San Lorenzo, Florence, upon the "square old yellow book," part print, part manuscript, which contained the crude fact from which his poem of the Franceschini murder case was developed.
The price was a lira, "eightpence English just." As he leaned by the fountain and walked through street and street, he read, and had mastered the contents before his foot was on the threshold of Casa Guidi[97].
That night his brain was a-work; pacing the terrace of Casa Guidi, while from Felice church opposite came the clear voice of the cloistered ones, Chanting a chant made for mid-summer nights, he gave himself up to the excitement of re-creating the actors and re-enacting their deeds in his imagination: I fused my live soul and that inert stuff, Before attempting smithcraft.
According to Mr Rudolf Lehmann, but possibly he has antedated the incident, Browning at once conceived the mode in which the subject could be treated in poetry, and it was precisely the mode which was afterwards adopted: "'When I had read the book,' so Browning told me, 'my plan was at once settled.

I went for a walk, gathered twelve pebbles from the road, and put them at equal distances on the parapet that bordered it.
Those represented the twelve chapters into which the poem is divided, and I adhered to that arrangement to the last.'"[98] When in the autumn he journeyed with his wife to Rome, the vellum-bound quarto was with him, but the persons from whom he sought further light about the murder and the trial could give little information or none.

Smithcraft did not soon begin.