Note 1 — Chapter I

A similar but more groundless suggestion, that the author of Holy-cross Day and Rabbi ben Ezra probably had Jewish blood in his veins, can only be described as an impertinence—not to Browning but to the Jewish race. As if to feel the spiritual genius of Hebraism and to be moved by the pathos of Hebraic fate were an eccentricity only to be accounted for by the bias of kin! It is significant that his demonstrable share of German blood left him rather conspicuously impervious to the literary—and more especially to the "metaphysical"—products of the German mind. [2] Browning himself reports the exclamation of the family doctor when trying to diagnose an attack of his: "Why, has anybody to search far for a cause of whatever nervous disorder you may suffer from, when there sits your mother—whom you so absolutely resemble!" (Letters to E.B.B., ii. 456.)