the previous year with the object of bringing the training of teachers, at the time uncodified, into the purview of Oxford and Cambridge universities to provide a greater intellectual foundation for the profession. TTS students were not members of the university, but attended lectures and were examined and certificated by the university. Despite Browning's enthusiasm, the syndicate struggled to establish itself in the face of the university's general indifference to teacher education, but was warmly supported by the educationist and cleric George Ridding, who told Browning: "The existence of such a Syndicate as yours appears to me to give ... the best possible opportunity for consultative construction of a future Theory for higher education". Two years later Browning published his first major book on educational theory, History of Educational Theories, later translated into several languages and reprinted several times up to 1905. In 1883 he edited a new version of John Milton's Tractate of Education. Browning was appointed to a formal King's College lectureship in 1880, and worked hard to establish himself as an academic historian. He published successful school textbooks on Modern England and Modern France, and edited a series of political memoranda and despatches from the Napoleonic era. He was elected to the Royal Historical Society in 1884, and was chairman of the society's council in 1885. During the following years he wrote prolifically, but his work did not bring him the scholastic recognition he hoped for. His books were regarded by his peers as slipshod and inaccurate, one critic writing: "If the reader is not particular about grammar and style, and is judiciously suspicious of dates, he, or more likely she, will derive both amusement and profit from Mr Browning's pages". In 1880 Browning's long-time friend George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) died; he was among the mourners at Highgate Cemetery when she was buried there on 29 December. Apart from his mother, she was the most influential woman in Browning's life; some of his acquaintances thought he wanted to marry her. He decided to honour her memory by writing her biography with, he said, "no claims to offer but a friendship of fifteen years, and a deep and unswerving devotion to her mind and character". Published in 1890 as part of a series on Great Writers, it was Browning's most successful book, with 39 editions being issued up to 2012. He followed it up with two short