Note 44 — Chapter V
Reading edition
The foregoing account assumes that the poem was not written, as is commonly supposed, in Florence in 1859-60, but after his settlement in London. The only ground for the current view is Mrs Browning's mention of his having been "working at a long poem" that winter (Letters, May 18, 1860). I am enabled, by the kindness of Prof. Hall Griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from Browning to Buchanan in 1871 shows this "long poem" to have been one on Napoleon III. (cf. above, p. 90). Some of it probably appears in Hohenstiel Schwangau.