Playwright, judge and MP, dedicatee of Pippa Passes. The great success of his verse tragedy Ion at Covent Garden Theatre in May 1836, with *Macready in the title-role, provided Macready and RB with a precedent for such serious literary drama as Strafford. Talfourd, at the party he gave after the first performance, proposed RB’s health—on the strength of Paracelsus—as ‘the youngest poet of England’ (Orr 88) and, according to one tradition, *Wordsworth responded ‘I am proud to drink your health, Mr Browning’ (Griffin & Minchin, [1910], p. 77). On the same occasion RB met *Landor and the writer and dramatist Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855) and, at the end of the evening, Macready suggested that he should write him a play. It was Ion, however, which for several decades enjoyed the sort of popularity, both on stage and as a published text, which eluded RB’s dramatic pieces.