There are many well-established cases of the influence of an earlier on a later poet—of Marlowe on Shakspere, of Spenser on Keats, of Keats on Tennyson, for instance; but it is not often that we have so clear an example of interaction between contemporaries as that of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. In these days of minute scholarship, it seems strange that so remarkable an instance should (so far as I am aware) have escaped detailed examination, in spite of the unwearying activity of graduate schools and Browning Societies. Both for its human and for its literary interest, the case seems worth presenting, at any rate in broad outline.