216
��NOTES BY THE WAY.
��Death of Mrs. Browning.
Chorley's grief.
��Her funeral.
��Sorrow in Florence.
��Inscription
over Casa
Guidi.
��Mrs. Browning all her life suffered from weak health, yet her death on the 29th of June, 1861, came as a shock to her friends I well remember the telegram being received at The Athenaeum,- and the sorrow it caused. At the request of Hepworth Dixon I at once went off to Chorley, and broke the news to him, asking him to write the obituary notice for us. It appeared on the 6th of July, and records how in early life she had been for years " the inmate of a darkened room doomed, as was thought, to slow death " ; how faithful she was to her friends, and " the most loving of human beings to all her kinsfolk " :
" Those whom she loved, and whom she has left, will remember her (so long as life lasts) by her womanly grace and tenderness, yet more than by her extraordinary and courageous genius."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning rests in the cemetery at Florence. She was buried as the sun was sinking behind the western hills, and " the distant mountains hid their faces in a misty veil, and the tall cypress trees swayed and sighed as Nature's special mourners for her favoured child."
Florence sorrowed as for one of her own children. As the mourners took their last fond look they saw a double grave, and uttered the prayer, " May it wait long for him ! " A battalion of the National Guard was to have followed the remains to the grave, but a misunderstanding as to time frustrated this testimony of respect.
The Florentine authorities requested that the poet's young son, Tuscan born, should be educated as an Italian, when any career in the new Italy should be open to him ; and over the door of Casa Guidi the municipality of Florence have placed this inscription (6 S. vi. 406), in gold incised capitals on a white marble tablet :
Qui scrisse e mori
Elisabetta Barrett Browning
che in cuore di donna conciliava
scienza di dotto e spirito di poeta
e fece del suo verso aureo anello
fra Italia e Inghilterra
Pone questa memoria
Firenze grata
1861.
��THE POST OFFICE, 1856-1906.
1906, Sept. l. The year 1906 was the jubilee of the division of London into
The Post postal districts. It was in December, 1856, that Rowland Hill announced his intention to divide London and its environs into ten districts, " each to be treated, in many respects, as a separate town." Notice of this was delivered at every house in London, the circular containing instructions as to the initials to be used, and stating that " if the initial letters be thus regularly appended,
��Office, 1856-1906.
London
divided into
districts.
�� �
