Front matter (continued 8)

Master Hugues Of Saxe-Gotha. (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) An organist in a church where they have just concluded the evening service determines to have a colloquy with the old dead composer Master Hugues as to the meaning of the compositions known as fugues for which he was celebrated. They were mountainous in their structure—the ideas were piled one upon another till their meaning was lost in cloudland. So, while the church is emptying and the altar ministrants are putting things to rights, he will look into the matter of the old quaint arithmetical music in fashion before Palestrina brought back music to the service of melody. There is but one inch of candle left in the socket, so the composer must tell him what he has to say quickly. First he delivers his phrase; he gives but a clause. He asserts nothing, puts forward no proposition; nevertheless there is an answer, though a needless one, and the two start off together. (It will be seen that the poet suggests five impersonations of characters taking part in the discussion or mangle of the composition.) A third interposes, and volunteers his help; a fourth must have his say, and a fifth must needs interfere. So the disputation is like that of a knot of angry politicians, who all want to speak at once, and will scarcely allow each other to utter a complete sentence. This is a perfect description of a fugue, which even to the uninstructed listener is a musical wrangle plainly enough. In the fugue the organist sees a moral of life, with its zigzags, dodges, and ins and outs. Truth and Nature are over our heads. God’s gold here and there shines out in our soul-manifestations, if we would but let truth and Nature have their way with us, the gold would be all the plainer to see; but with our evasions, our pretences, shams and subterfuges we have all but obliterated it, just as the inventor of the fugue has buried his melody under a mountain of musical tricks and pedantic finger puzzles. The organist pauses; he will have no more of it as a moral of life. The Jesuit’s casuistry, which went to prove that all sorts of evil things might under certain circumstances and under such and such restrictions become actual virtues, was swept away by Pascal’s clear-sighted common sense. So Master Hugues and his fugues shall vanish before the full organ blaring out the mode Palestrina—the grave, pure, truthful music of the Church. As Pascal to Escobar, so is Palestrina to Master Hugues; quibbles, shams, fencings with truth, overlay God’s gold with the cobwebs of tradition, and must be brushed away. “Rochell has quite correctly perceived that the approximate best symbol of the uncreated heaven is music. In the evolution of harmonies in the upper and lower notes, and their mutual conflict; in the solution of strife and tension into blessed calm; in the transmutation of the ever-recurring theme into new phrases; in the constant reappearance of the motif, of the question which seeks a reply through every evolution of the notes, and which leads the reply into a new process—in this we see the temporal symbol of the eternal rhythm, the eternal circular movement in God’s heaven, where melodious colours and radiant notes are interwoven with each other; where nothing lies in stagnant repose, but all is in motion; where unity and harmony are eternally effected by means of the contrasted, movements and action.” (Martensen’s Jacob Boehme, page 167.)

Notes.—Hugues is a purely imaginary composer. Verse i. “mountainous fugues”: “A fugue is a short, complete melody, which flies (hence the name) from one part to another, while the original part is continued in counterpoint against it. The beginning of this art-form dates from very primitive times” (Sir G. Macfarren). Probably Bach’s fugues are meant in the poem, vi., Aloys and Jurien and Just, sacristan’s assistants; “darn the sacrament lace”: the lace on the altar linen. The actual sacrament linen is washed by the clergy in the Roman Catholic Church. The church plate (i.e., chalice, paten, etc.) is cleaned by the clergy also, viii., claviers, the keyboard of the organ ix., “great breves as they wrote them of yore”: a breve is the longest note in music, and was formerly square in shape. In the old Spanish cathedrals I have seen the music-books used in the services of such a size that it required two men to carry them. The notes in such books are very large, xvi., “O Danaides, O Sieve!” the Danaides were the daughters of Danaus, who were condemned for their crimes to pour water for ever in the regions below into a vessel with holes in the bottom. xvii., Escobar, y Mendoza, was a Spanish casuist, the general tendency of whose writings was to find excuses for human frailties. Pascal severely criticised him in his Provincial Letters. His doctrines were disapproved at Rome. Escobar himself was a most excellent man. He died in 1669. xviii., “Est fuga, volvitur rota” == it is a flight, the wheel rolls itself round. xix., risposting == riposting, a term in fencing; in this case equal to making a repartee. xx., ticken == ticking, a twill fabric very closely woven. xxviii., meâ pœnâ == at my risk of punishment; Gorgon, a monster with a terrible head, with hair and girdle of snakes; “mode Palestrina”: Giovanni P. da Palestrina (1524-1594), now universally distinguished as the Prince of Music, emancipated his art from the trammels of pedantry, which, ignoring beauty as the most necessary element of music, was tending to reduce it to mere arithmetical problems.

May and Death. (Published first in The Keepsake, 1857; in 1864 published in Dramatis Personæ.) Mrs. Orr, in her Life and Letters of Robert Browning, says that the poet wrote this poem in remembrance of one of his boy companions, the eldest of “the three Silverthornes, his neighbours at Camberwell, and cousins on the maternal side.” The name of Charles in the poem stands for the old familiar Jim. Mrs. Silverthorne was the aunt who paid for the printing of Pauline. The verses express the wish that all the delights of spring had died with his friend; yet he would have spared one plant of the woods in May which has in its leaves a streak of spring’s blood. Where’er the leaf grows in a wood they know the red drop comes from the poet’s heart. The question has often been asked “What is the plant referred to in the fourth stanza?” The following reply was given in the Browning Society’s Papers:—“Surely the Polygonum Persicaria or Spotted Persicaria is the plant referred to. It is a common weed, with purple stains upon its rather large leaves; these spots varying in size and vividness of colour according to the nature of the soil where it grows.” The Rev. H. Friend, in Flowers and Flower Lore (p. 5), says:—“Respecting the Virgin, I have recently found the country folk in one part of Oxfordshire retaining an interesting legend which connects the name of her ladyship with the Spotted Persicaria. It will be remembered that, in consequence of the dark spot which marks the centre of every leaf belonging to this plant, popular tradition asserts that it grew beneath the Cross, and received this distinction through the drops of blood which fell from the Saviour’s wounds touching its leaves. The Oxonian however, says that the Virgin was wont of old to use its leaves for the manufacture of a valuable ointment, but that on one occasion she sought it in vain. Finding it afterwards, when the need had passed away, she condemned it, and gave it the rank of an ordinary weed. This is expressed in the local rhyme:—

The mark on the leaf is the impression of the Virgin’s finger, and the persicaria is now the only weed that is not useful for something.” Again (p. 191) he says, “We are told that in some parts of England the arum, commonly called lords and ladies, cows and calves, parson in the pulpit, or parson and clerk, is known as Gethsemane, because it is said to have been growing at the foot of the cross, and to have received on its leaves some of the blood:—

The same tradition clings to the purple orchis and the spotted persicaria. We have already seen how many plants are supposed to have gained their purple hue or ruddy colour from blood of hero, god, or martyr. A similar legend seems to have been at one time attached to the purple-stained flowers of the wood-sorrel, which is by Italian painters, including Fra Angelico, occasionally placed in the foreground of their pictures representing the Crucifixion. This plant is called Alleluia in Italian, which may have had something to do, however, with its association with the Cross of Christ, ‘as if the very flowers round the Cross were giving glory to God.’ The wallflower, that ‘scents the dewy air,’ is in Palestine called ‘the blood-drops of Christ’; and its deep hue has led to its being called by a similar name in the West of England. The rose-coloured lotus, or melilot, was said to have sprung in like manner from the blood of the lion slain by the Emperor Adrian. It is probable that the story was the modification of some earlier myth. Mr. Conway tells us he has somewhere met with a legend telling that the thorn-crown of Christ was made from rose-briar, and that the drops of blood that started under it and fell to the ground blossomed to roses. Mrs. Howe, the American poetess, beautifully alludes to this in the lines—

Meeting at Night and Parting at Morning. (Originally published as Night and Morning in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, Bells and Pomegranates, VII.: 1845.) The speaker is a man who joyfully seeks his happy seaside home at night, where he rejoins the wife from whom the demands of his daily work have separated him. In the sequel (Parting at Morning) the rising sun calls men to work: the man of the poem to work of a lucrative character; and excites in the woman (if we interpret the slightly obscure line correctly) a desire for more society than the seaside home affords. Commentators on these poems have evidently “jumped the difficulty.”

Melander. The author whose work “Joco-Seria” suggested the title of Mr. Browning’s volume of poems Jocoseria (q.v.).

Melon-Seller, The. (Ferishtah’s Fancies, II.) The second of the lessons learned by Ferishtah on his way to dervishhood. He sees a well-remembered face in a melon-seller near a bridge. He was once the Shah’s Prime Minister: he peculated, and was disgraced. Shocked at the contrast between what the man was and has now become, Ferishtah asks him if he did not curse God for the twelve years’ bliss he enjoyed only to end in misery like that? The beggar contemptuously asked his questioner if he were unwise enough to think him such a fool as to repine at God’s just punishment on sin, and to reproach Him with the happiness he had tasted in the past? Job said: “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and evil not receive?” This was just what the melon-seller said. “But great wits jump”; and Ferishtah, having learned the great lesson, went his way to dervishhood. The Lyric asks for a little severity from Love: so much undeserved bliss has been imparted, that a little injustice seems requisite to balance things.

Memorabilia. (Men and Women, 1855—when the title was Memorabilia (on Seeing Shelley); Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A man with a soul crosses a vast moor, a blankness of miles, but on one hand-breadth spot he spies an eagle’s feather, which he cherishes. An eagle’s feather meant something to the man with the soul, the miles of blank moor had nothing to say to him; and so once he saw Shelley plain, and even spoke to him. The man had lived long before and had lived long after, but the sight of Shelley and the words he spoke made just that hand-breadth of his life something different from all the colourless remainder. [Some there are who love to say the same of Robert Browning!] Mr. Browning early in his youth (1825) fell under the influence of Shelley. Mr. Sharp, in his Life of Browning, says that, as he was one day passing a bookstall, “he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as ‘Mr. Shelley’s Atheistical Poem,—very scarce.’ He had never heard of Shelley, nor did he learn for a long time that the Dæmon of the World and the miscellaneous poems appended thereto constituted a literary piracy.” He discovered that there was such a poet as Shelley; that he had written several volumes, and was dead. He begged his mother to procure him Shelley’s works, which she had some difficulty in doing, as several booksellers to whom she applied knew nothing of them. The books were ultimately purchased at Ollier’s shop, in Vere Street. Shelley, as Mr. Sharp says, “enthralled” Browning. His first work, Pauline, was written under the dominance of the Shelley passion. He refers to Shelley in Sordello. Memorabilia was composed in the Roman Campagna in the winter of 1853-54.

Men and Women. (Published in 1855, in two vols.; now dispersed in vols. iii., iv. and v. of Poetical Works, 1868.) The poems included under this general title were fifty-one in number.

Vol. 1. contained the following:—“Love among the Ruins,” “A Lovers’ Quarrel,” “Evelyn Hope,” “Up at a Villa—Down in the City,” “A Woman’s Last Word,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” “By the Fireside,” “Any Wife to any Husband,” “An Epistle of Karshish,” “Mesmerism,” “A Serenade at the Villa,” “My Star,” “Instans Tyrannus,” “A Pretty Woman,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “Respectability,” “A Light Woman,” “The Statue and the Bust,” “Love in a Life,” “Life in a Love,” “How it Strikes a Contemporary,” “The Last Ride Together,” “The Patriot,” “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,” “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” “Memorabilia.”

Vol. II.: “Andrea del Sarto,” “Before,” “After,” “In Three Days,” “In a Year,” “Old Pictures in Florence,” “In a Balcony,” “Saul,” “De Gustibus——,” “Women and Roses,” “Protus,” “Holy-Cross Day,” “The Guardian Angel,” “Cleon,” “The Twins,” “Popularity,” “The Heretic’s Tragedy,” “Two in the Campagna,” “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” “One Way of Love,” “Another Way of Love,” “Transcendentalism,” “Misconceptions,” “One Word More.”

In the six-volume edition of Poetical Works the poems comprised under the title of Men and Women are the following, and it is these which are generally understood now by the Men and Women poems:—“Transcendentalism,” “How it Strikes a Contemporary,” “Artemis Prologuises,” “An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish the Arab Physician,” “Pictor Ignotus,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church,” “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” “Cleon,” “Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli,” “One Word More.”

Unquestionably in these works we have the very flower of Mr. Browning’s genius. There is not one of them which the world will willingly let die. As Mr. Symons says, their distinguishing feature is “the monologue brought to perfection. Such monologues as Andrea del Sarto, or The Epistle of Karshish, never have been, and probably never will be, surpassed, on their own ground, after their own order.”

Mesmerism. (Dramatic Romances: 1855.) A description of an influence of one mind upon another, which would in modern medical parlance be termed hypnotism. When an operator has this power, and has frequently exercised it upon his subject, it is undoubtedly true that what is here described in so lifelike a manner may actually take place. The subject may have been led to expect that she would be required to undertake the journey in question, and the mind in that case would contribute to the success of the operation. Hypnosis and somnambulism are not produced by any fluid which escapes from the mesmeriser’s body, but by the fact that the subject has been induced to form a fixed idea that he is being hypnotised. Braid asserts that the imagination of the subject is an indispensable element in the success of the experiment; he declares that the most expert hypnotiser will exert himself in vain unless the subject is aware of what is passing and surrenders himself body and soul. Binet and Frere, in their valuable work on Animal Magnetism, p. 96, say that “a whole series of purely physical agents exist, which prove that sleep can be induced without the aid of the subject’s imagination, against his will, and without his knowledge.” The incidents of the poem may all be accounted for by the doctrine of expectant attention. The use of hypnotic suggestion for criminal purposes is referred to in stanzas xxvi. and xxvii.—a very real danger from a medico-legal point of view, as some think. At night, when all is quiet but the noises peculiar to the hours of darkness, the mesmeriser of the poem desires that the woman under the influence of his will-power shall forthwith make her way to him through the rain and mud straight to his house. In due time she enters without a word. Recognising the wonderful influence which one mind may exercise upon another, the operator prays that he may never abuse it, and he reflects that one day God will call him to account for its exercise.

Mihrab Shah. (Ferishtah’s Fancies, 6.) The Mystery of Evil and Pain. An inquirer, while culling herbs, has had his thumb nipped by a scorpion. He wishes to know “Why needs a scorpion be? Why, in fact, needs any evil or pain happen to man if God be wholly good and omnipotent?” Ferishtah replies that when he awoke in the morning he was thankful that his head did not tumble off his neck. “But,” says the inquirer, “heads do not fall unchopped.” Says the dervish, “They might do so by natural law; why might not a staff loosed from the hand spring skyward as naturally as it falls to the ground?” What would be the bond ’twixt man and man if pain were abolished? Take away from man thanks to God and love to man, what is he worth? The lyric explains the compensations of existence. The ardent soul is enshrined in feeble flesh, the sluggish soul in a robust frame. What one person lacks is found in another, and this creates a bond of sympathy between our spirits. No one has everything. What we lack we admire when present in another, and so our own defects are pardoned for what in us is excellent.

Mildred Tresham. (A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.) The lady who is loved by Lord Henry Mertoun, and visited by him in secret at night. She dies when she learns that her brother has killed her lover.

Misconceptions. (Men and Women, 1855.) A beautiful fancy of a branch on which a bird has rested a moment bursting into bloom for pride and joy that it has been so honoured. The poet treats it as symbolical of a heart which has thrilled for a moment under the smiles of a queen ere she went on to her true-love throne.

Mr. Sludge, “The Medium.” (Dramatis Personæ: 1864.) Mr. Sludge is a “medium” who has been detected by his dupe in the act of cheating. He has worked upon his patron’s love for his dead mother, has pretended that he has had communications with the spirit world, and has found it a profitable business. However, he is found out, the game is up, he is half throttled by the man whom he has swindled, and is about to be kicked out of his house. He admits the cheating, but tries to make out that it was prompted by a low species of spirit (elementals as they are called). He offers, if liberally paid, to explain how the fraud has been carried out. He pretends one moment that he is repentant, the next he proposes to increase his guilt by falsely accusing his too confiding benefactor. He is prepared to swear that he picked a quarrel with him to get back the presents he had given. The bargain is made; and the medium, seated again at the “dear old table” which has so often been the partner of his performances, proceeds to explain that it is much more the fault of the public that they are cheated, than that of the artful folk who are always ready to meet demand by supply. In many things, but especially in affairs relating to the unseen world, people are willing to be deceived; and, as Demosthenes said, “Nothing is more easy than to deceive ourselves, as our affections are subtle persuaders.”

said Sludge. “Everybody is interested in ghosts, and everybody will listen to the ghost-seer. A poor lad, the son of a servant in your house, talks to you about money, and you immediately suspect him of having stolen some; if he talk to you about seeing spirits, you encourage him to tell his story, and you listen with open ears. You make allowances for the unexplained ‘phenomena,’ and you are not disconcerted by his blunders. So the boy is encouraged to try again, to see more, hear more and stranger things. You have patience with the primary manifestations, always weak at first; you discourage doubts as always fatal to them, and thus educate the boy in his cheating. He is compelled to invent; you prompt him, your readiness to be deceived confirms him in his readiness to deceive. It is not that the boy starts as a liar; he will soon enough develop into that; at first however,

He brightens up his dull facts till they shine, and you no longer recognise them as dull, but brilliant. He hears what other mediums have done, he estimates your demands of him; you push him to the brink, he is compelled to dive. Let him confess his deception, and he has to go back to the gutter from which you have taken him. Let him keep on, and he lives in clover. And so he manufactures for you all you demand. He has heard raps and seen a light. ‘Shaped somewhat like a star?’ you eagerly inquire. ‘Well, like some sort of stars, ma’am.’ ‘So we thought!’ you say. ‘And any voice?’ ‘Not yet.’ ‘Try hard next time!’ Next time you have the voice. The medium is launched in the rapids. The falls are hard by: nothing can hinder but he must go over. He becomes the medium which has been required of him. The spirits forthwith speak up and become familiar and confidential. If any complain that the spirits do not fulfil our expectation of what the ghosts of Bacon, Cromwell, or Beethoven should be and do, the answer is ready and assumes two forms. If Bacon is deficient in spelling, does not know where he was born or in what year he died, this is no argument against spiritualism. The spirits are of all orders; and many, perhaps most, are tricksy, undeveloped, and delight to deceive. Or, again, the explanation is put in this way:—What is a medium? He is the means, and the only means, by which the spirits can hold converse with mortals. They have no organs; they must use ours. The medium holding converse with the spirit of Beethoven, not being much of a musician, is, of course, only able very imperfectly to express the composer’s musical soul. He pours in—to Sludge’s soul—a sonata. If it comes out the Shakers’ Hymn in G, that is the defect of the means or medium by which the master has been driven to express himself.” Sludge tells his dupe that it was thus he helped him out of every scrape; and the fools who attended every seance did not criticise. Why should they? They did not criticise his wine or his furniture—why should they criticise his medium? Of course they sometimes doubted. “Ah!” says the host, “it was just this spirit of doubt pervading the circle which confused the medium and accounted for his errors!” Sludge often got out of his difficulties that way. Sometimes, however the awful aspect of truth would present itself so sternly before him as to spoil all the cockering and cosseting he received, and he would gnash his teeth at the thought of the ruin of his soul by the humbug forced upon him. The cheating was nursed out of the lying. He would have stopped, but his dupes were for progress; they always demanded fresh and more striking “phenomena”—from talking to writing, from writing to flowers from the spirit world. If he actually were detected in jogging the table, or making squeaks with his toes, he would be accused of joking; if he pretended he was not, then he was at once in the dupe’s power. Then the cheating is so easy! A master of an ordinary trade can perform miracles to the untaught. The glass-blower, pipe maker, even the baker, by long practice, can puzzle the uninitiated; practise table-tilting, joint-cracking, playing tricks in the dark, and the phenomena of the medium’s business become easy as an old shoe. But, apart from this actual trickery, can the hardest head detect where the cheating begins, even if he is on his guard? There is a real love of a lie, and liars have no difficulty in attracting those who are only waiting to be deceived, and the most sceptical are just the most likely to be caught. Then the Solomon of saloons, the philosophic diner-out,—these were his patrons. They “wanted a doctrine for a chopping-block.” They had to be singular, and hack and hew common sense to show their skill in dialectics. These had Sludge injured. Then he reminds his patrons that the Bible teaches spiritualism. We all start with a stock of it; and stars even, we are taught, are not only worlds and suns, but stand for signs when we should set about our proper business. Sludge declares he has taught himself to live by signs: he is broken to the way of nods and winks. He has not waited for the tingle of the bell, but has obeyed the tap of knuckles on the wall. Suppose he blunders nine times out of ten as to the meaning of the knuckle summons, is he not a gainer if the tenth time he guesses right? Everybody blunders even as he. The thing is to imitate the ant-eater, and keep his tongue out to catch all nature’s motes for food. It is wisdom to respect the infinitely little, for God comes close behind the animalcule, life simplified to a mere cell. All was not cheating either: he has told his lie and seen truth follow. He knows not why he did what he never tried to do, described what he never saw, spoke more than he ever intended; and though he believes everybody can and does cheat, he is not less sure that every cheat’s every inspired lie contains a germ of truth. Pervade this world by an influx from the next, and all the dead, dry, dull facts of existence spring into life and freshness, as at the touch of harlequin’s wand; and harlequin’s wand is Sludge’s lie, for which the inanimate world was waiting. You see the real world through the false, and so you have the golden age all by the help of a little lying. At most, Sludge is only a poet who acts the books which poets write. The more to his honour! But all his specious reasoning fails to reassure his awakened dupe, who gives him the notes he promised and dismisses him. No sooner is the medium out of the presence of the man whom he has deceived than he pours out a volley of abuse, and wishes he dare burn down the house; he will declare that he throttled his “sainted mother”—the old hag—in such a fit of passion as his throat had just felt the effects of; he reproaches himself for not having prophesied he would die within a year; but he consoles himself with counting his money, and reflecting that his awakened dupe is not the only fool in the world. “Sludge” is D. D. Home, the American medium. Mrs. Browning was an ardent spiritualist, and Mr. Browning, in consequence, had considerable experience of the ways of mediums and the talk and arguments of their followers. Although no medium ever reasoned with such skill and subtlety as Sludge, the main arguments used by this impostor are precisely those put forward by spiritualists. The mediums are a wretchedly weak, invertebrate order of beings, quite incapable of any such virile processes of thought as those expressed in the poem. There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that Mr. Browning intended to make any defence for any phase of spiritualism whatever: he has simply gathered into a poem the best which could be put forward for spiritualism, and directed it upon the personality of Sludge. Intimate friends of the Brownings assure me that Mr. Browning with great difficulty restrained his disgust at the practices of spiritualists, and his annoyance at the fact that his wife devoted so much time and attention to this aspect of human folly. Perhaps the feature which angered him most was the habit of trading upon and outraging the most sacred feelings of the human heart, in the endeavour to gain clients for a money-making occupation.

Notes.—Catawba wine: a white wine of American make, from grapes first discovered about 1801 near the banks of the Catawba river. Its praises have been sung by Longfellow. Greeley: Horace Greeley, the eminent American editor. His history was identified with the fortunes of his paper the Tribune. “Nothing lasts, as Bacon came and said”: Bacon’s Essay LVIII. is Of the Vicissitude of Things. Phenomena: the spiritualists’ term for the antics of tables, pats, twitchings, ghostly lights, tinkling of bells, etc., at their séances. The Horseshoe: the great waterfall of that name at Niagara. Pasiphae: the daughter of the Sun and of Perseis, who married Minos, King of Crete. She was enamoured of a bull, or more probably of an officer named Taurus (a bull). Odic Lights: Od, the name given by Reichenbach to an influence he believed he had discovered; it was held to explain the phenomena of mesmerism, and to account for the luminous appearances at spirit-rapping circles. “Canthus of my eye” == the corner of the eye. Stomach cyst, an animalcule which is nothing more than a bag, without limbs or organs; one of the infusoria, the simplest of creatures endowed with animal life. “The Bridgewater book”: The Earl of Bridgewater (1758-1829) devised by his will £8,000 at the disposal of the President of the Royal Society, to be paid to the authors of treatises “On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation.” Several of the treatises are now famous books, as Bell on The Hand, Kirby on Habits and Instincts of Animals, and Whewell’s Astronomy. Eutopia == Utopia.

Molinos. See Molinists.

Molinists, The (Ring and the Book), were followers of Michael Molinos, a Spanish priest and spiritual director of great repute in Rome, who was a cadet of a noble Spanish family of Sarragossa. He was born on December 21st, 1627. In 1675 he published, during his residence in Rome, his famous work entitled The Spiritual Guide, a book which taught the doctrine known as that of Quietism. This species of mysticism had previously been taught by John Tauler and Henry Suso, as also by St. Theresa and St. Catherine of Siena, but in a different and more orthodox form than that in which it was presented by Molinos. Butler, in his Life of St. John of the Cross, says that the system of perfect contemplation called Quietism chiefly turned upon the following general principles:—1. In perfect contemplation the man does not reason, but passively receives heavenly light, the mind being in a state of perfect inattention and inaction. 2. A soul in that state desires nothing, not even its own salvation; and fears nothing, not even hell itself. 3. That when the soul has arrived at this state, the use of the sacraments and of good works becomes indifferent. Pope Innocent XI., in 1687, condemned sixty-eight propositions extracted from this author as heretical, scandalous and blasphemous. Molinos was condemned by the Inquisition at Rome, recanted his errors, and ended his life in imprisonment in 1696.

Monaldeschi. (Cristina and Monaldeschi.) The Marquis Monaldeschi, the grand equerry of Queen Cristina of Sweden. He was put to death at Fontainebleau by order of Cristina, because he had betrayed her.

Monsignore the Bishop. (Pippa Passes.) He comes to Asolo to confer with his “Intendant” in the palace by the Duomo; he is contriving how to remove Pippa from his path, when her song as she passes stings his conscience, and he punishes his evil counsellor who suggested mischief concerning her.

Morgue, The, at Paris. (Apparent Failure.) The place by the Seine where the dead are exposed for identification.

Muckle-Mouth Meg (“Big-Mouth Meg”). (Asolando, 1889.) Sir Walter Scott was a descendant of the house of Harden, and of the famous chieftain Auld Watt of that line. Auld Watt was once reduced in the matter of live stock to a single cow, and recovered his dignity by stealing the cows of his English neighbours. Professor Veitch says “the Scots’ Border ancestry were sheep farmers, who varied their occupation by ‘lifting’ sheep and cattle, and whatever else was ‘neither too heavy nor too hot.’” The lairds of the Border were, in fact, a race of robbers. Sir Walter Scott was proud of this descent, and his fame as a writer was due to his Border history and poetry. The poem describes the capture red-handed of the handsome young William Scott, Lord of Harden, who was defeated in one of these forays, and taken prisoner by Sir Gideon Murray of Elibank, who ordered him to the gallows. But the Laird’s dame interposed, asking grace for the callant if he married “our Muckle-mouth Meg.” The young fellow said he preferred the gallows to the wide-mouthed monster. He was sent to the dungeon for a week; after seven days of cold and darkness he was asked to reconsider his decision. He found life sweet, and embraced the ill-favoured maiden.

Muléykeh, (Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, 1880.) A tale of an Arab’s love for his horse. The story is a common one, and seems adapted from a Bedouin’s anecdote told in Rollo Springfield’s The Horse and his Rider. Hóseyn was despised by strangers for his apparent poverty. He had neither flocks nor herds, but he possessed Muléykeh, his peerless mare, his Pearl: he could afford to laugh at men’s land and gold. In the race Muléykeh was always first, and Hóseyn was a proud man. Now, Duhl, the son of Sheybán, withered for envy of Hóseyn’s luck, and nothing but the possession of the Pearl would satisfy him: so he rode to Hóseyn’s tent, told him he knew that he was poor, and offered him a thousand camels for the mare. Hóseyn would not consider the proposal for a moment. “I love Muléykeh’s face,” he said, and dismissed her would-be purchaser. In a year’s time Duhl is back again at Hóseyn’s tent. This time he would not offer to buy the Pearl. He tells him his soul pines to death for her beauty, and his wife has urged him to go and beg for the mare. Hóseyn said, “It is life against life. What good avails to the life bereft?” Another year passes, and the crafty Duhl is back again—this time to steal what he can neither buy nor beg. It is night. Hóseyn lies asleep beside the Pearl, with her headstall thrice wound about his wrist By Muléykeh’s side stands her sister Buhéyseh, a famous mare for fleetness too: she stands ready saddled and bridled, in case some thief should enter and fly with the Pearl. Now Duhl enters as stealthily as a serpent, cuts the headstall, mounts her, and is “launched on the desert like bolt from bow.” Hóseyn starts up, and in a minute more is in pursuit on Buhéyseh. They gain on the fugitive, for Muléykeh misses the tap of the heel, the touch of the bit—the secret signs by which her master was wont to urge her to her utmost speed. Now they are neck by croup, what does Hóseyn but shout—

Duhl did so: Muléykeh redoubled her pace and vanished for ever. When the neighbours saw Hóseyn at sunrise weeping upon the ground, he told them the whole story, and when they laughed at him for a fool, and told him if he had held his tongue, as a boy or a girl could have done, Muléykeh would be with him then:—

Music Poems. The great poems dealing with music are “Abt Vogler,” “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,” “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” and “Charles Avison.” Other poems which are musical in a lesser degree are “Saul,” “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” “The Serenade,” “Up at a Villa,” “The Heretic’s Tragedy.” “Balaustion’s Adventure” and “Fifine” also have incidental music references.

My Last Duchess—Ferrara. (Published first in Bells and Pomegranates, III., under Dramatic Lyrics, with the title “Italy,” in 1842; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) A stern, severe, Italian nobleman, with a nine-hundred-years’ name, is showing his picture gallery, to the envy of a Count whose daughter he is about to marry. He is standing before the portrait of his last duchess, for he is a widower, and is telling his companion that “the depth and passion of her earnest glance” was not reserved for her husband alone, but the slightest courtesy or attention was sufficient to call up “that spot of joy” into her face. “Her heart,” said the duke, “was too soon made glad, too easily impressed.” She smiled on her husband (she was his property, and that was right); she smiled on others (on every one, in fact), and that was an infringement of the rights of property which this dealer in human souls could not brook, so he “gave commands,”—“then all smiles stopped together.” The concentrated tragedy of this line is a good example of the poet’s power of compressing a whole life story in two or three words. The heartless duke instantly dismisses the memory of his duchess and her fount of human love sealed up “by command.” “We’ll go together down, sir,”—and as they descend he draws his guest’s attention to a fine bronze group, and discusses the question of the dowry he is to receive with the woman who is to succeed his last duchess.

Note.—Fra Pandolf and Claus of Innsbruck are imaginary artists. Without very careful attention several delicate points in this poem will be lost. When the duke said “Fra Pandolf” by design, he desired to impress on the envoy, and his master the Count, the sort of behaviour he expected from the woman he was about to marry. He intimated that he would tolerate no rivals for his next wife’s smiles. When he begs his guest to “Notice Neptune——taming a sea horse,” he further intimated how he had tamed and killed his last duchess. All this was to convey to the envoy, and through him to the lady, that he demanded in his new wife the concentration of her whole being on himself, and the utmost devotion to his will.

My Star. (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) To one observer a beautiful star may appear in iridiscent colours unobserved by others; just as, by looking at a prism from a certain angle, we catch a play of rainbow tints which they might miss by adopting a different point of view. Where strangers see a world, the singer obtains access to a soul which opens to him all its glory, as the prism reveals the constituent colours which combine to make the cold white ray of light. The poem has been considered to be a tribute to Mrs. Browning.

My Wife Gertrude. See Boot and Saddle.

Naddo (Sordello) was a troubadour, and the Philistine friend and counsellor of Sordello. He told Sordello not to try to introduce his own ideas to the world: poetry should be founded in common-sense and deal with the common ideas of mankind. The poet should, above all things, try to please his audience. People like calm and repose. He must not attempt to rise to an intellectual level his readers have not reached. Sordello, he said, should be satisfied with being a poet, and not aim at being a leader of men as well. Mr. Browning is in all this defending himself and satirising the popular view of the poet’s province.

Names, The. A poem written for the “Show-Book” of the Shakespearean Show at the Albert Hall, May 1884, held on behalf of the Hospital for Women in the Fulham Road, London:—

Reprinted in the Pall Mall Gazette of May 29th.

The Hebrews will not pronounce the sacred tetragrammaton יהוה. They substitute Adonai in reading the ineffable name. Jahwé (with the J pronounced as Y) is the correct pronunciation of the unspeakable name. Yet the learned hold that the true mirific name is lost, the word “Jehovah” dating only from the Masoretic innovation. See a discussion of the whole matter in Isis Unveiled (Blavatsky), vol. ii. p. 398,—a work which contains a good deal of real learning mixed with infinite rubbish.

Napoleon III. See Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

Nationality in Drinks. Under this title we have three poems, originally published separately—namely, Claret, Tokay, and Beer. The first and second were published in Hood’s Magazine, in June 1844. In 1863 the poems were brought under their present title in the Poetical Works. In Claret the fancy of the poet sees in his claret-flask, as it drops into a black-faced pond, a resemblance to a gay French lady, with her arms held beside her and her feet stretched out, dropping from life into death’s silent ocean. In Tokay the bottle suggests a pygmy castle-warder, dwarfish, but able and determined, strutting about with his huge brass spurs and daring anybody to interfere with him. Beer is in memory of the beverage drunk to Nelson’s memory off Cape Trafalgar: it includes an authentic anecdote given to the poet by the captain of the vessel. He said they show a coat of Nelson’s at Greenwich with tar still on the shoulder, due to the habit he had of leaning one shoulder up against the mizzen-rigging.

Natural Magic. (Pacchiarotto and other Poems, 1876.) Hindū conjurors are exceedingly clever, and will produce a tree from apparently nothing at all, in all stages of growth. In the case described the narrator locks a nautch girl in an empty room and takes his stand at the door; in a short time the conjuror is embowered in a mass of verdure, fruit and flowers. In the same way, by the magic of a charming personality, the singer’s life has been transformed from coldness and gloom to warmth and beauty. The poem illustrates the supreme power which spirit exerts over matter. The power of the ideal world, the all-absorbing influence of faith in the unseen to the Christian, is always being exerted to produce such effects in the souls of men and women whose lives are spent in the most squalid and unlovely surroundings.

“Nay, but you who do not love her.” (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, 1845; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) The first line of a song in praise of some tresses of a lady’s hair. Even those who do not love her must admit she is pure gold. As for him, he cannot praise her, he loves her so much: he will leave the praise for those who do not.

Ned Bratts. (Published in Dramatic Idyls, first series, 1879; written at Splügen.) The story is taken from The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, by John Bunyan, the author of the Pilgrim’s Progress, and published in London 1680. “At a Summer Assizes holden at Hartfort, while the Judge was sitting upon the Bench, comes this old Tod into the Court, cloathed in a green suit, with a Leathern Girdle in his hand, his bosom open and all in a dung sweat, as if he had run for his Life; and being come in, he spake aloud as follows: ‘My Lord,’ said he, ‘Here is the veriest rogue that breathes upon the face of the earth. I have been a thief from a child; when I was but a little one I gave myself to rob orchards, and to do other such-like wicked things, and I have continued a thief ever since. My Lord, there has not been a robbery committed these many years, so many miles of this place, but I have either been at it, or privy to it.’ The Judge thought the fellow was mad, but after some conference with some of the Justices, they agreed to indict him; and so they did, of several felonious actions, to all which he heartily confessed Guilty, and so was hanged with his wife at the same time.” In the poem, Ned Bratts, the scene is laid at Bedford. The assizes are held on a broiling day in June; the court-house is crammed; horse stealers, rogues, puritans and preachers are being tried and sentenced, when through the barriers there burst Publican Ned Bratts and Tabitha his wife, loudly confessing they were the “worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged,” and detailing the various high crimes and misdemeanours of which they had long been guilty. He tells of the laces they had bought of the Tinker in the Bedford cage, and of

tells of the Book which the girl gave him, the Book her father wrote in prison, which told of “Christmas” [he meant “Christian”]. “Christmas was meant for me,” he says,—he must get rid of his burden and hurry from “Destruction,” which to him is Bedford town. So fearful are the converted couple that they will fall again into their old sins, and so miss Heaven’s gate, they beg the judges to

Ned sank upon his knees in the old court-house, while his wife Tab wheezed a hoarse “Do hang us, please!” The Lord Chief Justice wondered what judge ever had such a case before him since the world began, and having thought the matter over, said—

And so they were.

Never the Time and the Place. (Jocoseria, 1883.) It is impossible to doubt that in this exquisite poem is enshrined the memory of Mrs. Browning. Joy and beauty are all around, time and place are all that heart could wish, but the loved one is absent, and nothing can fill her place. Yet beyond the reach of storms and stranger they will meet! The eternal value of human love is again asserted in this poem.

Norbert. (In a Balcony.) The young man with whom the Queen has fallen in love, but whose heart is given to Constance.

“Not with my Soul Love.” The tenth lyric in Ferishtah’s Fancies begins with these words.

Now. (Asolando, 1889.) The value of “the quintessential moment,” a theme on which Mr. Browning frequently dilates, is emphasized in this poem—

when the assurance comes that love has been definitely won despite of time future and time past.

Nude in Art, The, is defended by the poet in Francis Furini and The Lady and the Painter.

Numpholeptos. (Pacchiarotto, with other Poems, 1876.) The word means “caught or entranced by a nymph.” Primitive man always has invested natural objects with some form of life more or less resembling our own. The Greeks and Romans believed the hills, the woods and the streams to be the peculiar dwelling-places of nymphs, the spirits of external Nature. They were the maidens of heaven, daughters of Zeus. The nymphs of the rivers and fountains were called Naiads; those of the forests and mountains were Dryads, Hamadryads, and Oreades. Plutarch, in his Life of Aristides, says that “when the hero sent to Delphi to inquire of the oracle, he was told that the Athenians would be victorious if they addressed prayers to Jupiter, Juno, Pan, and the nymphs Sphragitides.” The cave of these nymphs was “in one of the summits of Mount Cithæron, opposite the quarter where the sun sets in the summer; and it is said in that cave there was formerly an oracle, by which many who dwelt in those parts were inspired, and therefore called Nympholepti.” There was an unnatural idea about a human being enchained by a nymph, just as in the Rhine legends the connection of sailors with the water maidens always brought mischief to the human being so fascinated. It was thought by the Greeks that the Nympholepti lost their reason, though they gained superior wisdom of the inferior gods. See De Quincey on the Nympholeptoi. (Works, Masson’s Ed., vol. viii., pp. 438, 442.) In Mr. Browning’s poem the nymph is a pure, superhuman woman creature, who has entranced a young man enamoured of her heavenly perfections. She has set him an impossible task; from the centre of pure white light she bids him trace ray after ray of light, which is broken into rainbow tints; and she bids him return to her untinctured by the coloured beams he has been compelled to traverse. The poem is one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, of Mr. Browning’s works. It is his largest use of his favourite light metaphor—the breaking up of pure white light into the coloured rays of the solar spectrum. A ray of white light (it is unnecessary, perhaps, to explain) is composed of the seven primary colours—violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. A solar ray of light can be separated by a prism into these seven colours. These again, when painted side by side upon a disc which is rapidly revolved, are, as the poet says, “whirled into a white.” The nymph dwells in a realm of this white light. Before the light reaches the young man the imperfection of the medium which conveys it, or of his soul which receives it, breaks up the white light into its constituent coloured rays. He is bidden by her to travel down each red and yellow ray line, and work in its tint, but return to her without a stain, as pure as the original beams which rayed forth from her dwelling-place. This he is unable to do. He returns again and again, exciting her disgust at his appearance; and he starts off on another path, only to return coloured by the medium in which he has lived, as before. I have discussed this poem at length in my chapter on “Browning’s Science, as shown in Numpholeptos,” in my Browning’s Message to his Time, second edition, 1891. The poem was debated at the Browning Society on May 31st, 1891; and so many different explanations were suggested, none of them in the least satisfactory, that the meeting requested Dr. Furnivall to ask Mr. Browning’s assistance in the matter. He did so, and received the following reply:—“Is not the key to the meaning of the poem in its title, νυμφοληπτος [caught or entranst by a nymph], not γυναικεραστἠς [a woman lover]? An allegory, that is, of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally as such by a man who, all the while, cannot quite blind himself to the demonstrable fact that the possessor of knowledge and purity obtained without the natural consequences of obtaining them by achievement—not inheritance,—such a being is imaginary, not real, a nymph and no woman; and only such an one would be ignorant of and surprised at the results of a lover’s endeavour to emulate the qualities which the beloved is entitled to consider as pre-existent to earthly experience, and independent of its inevitable results. I had no particular woman in my mind; certainly never intended to personify wisdom, philosophy, or any other abstraction; and the orb, raying colour out of whiteness, was altogether a fancy of my own. The ‘seven spirits’ are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron,—a common image.”

“Oh Love! Love!” The lyric of Euripides in his Hippolytus (B.C. 428). Translated in J. P. Mahaffy’s “Euripides,” in Macmillan’s Classical Writers. After quoting Euripides’ two stanzas, Mr. Mahaffy says (p. 115):—“Mr. Browning has honoured me (Dec. 18th, 1878), with the following translation of these stanzas, so that the general reader may not miss the meaning or the spirit of the ode. The English metre, though not a strict reproduction, gives an excellent idea of the original one”:—

Og. See note to Jochanan Hakkadosh in the Sonnets on the Talmudic legend of the giant Og’s bones and bedstead. Jewish scholars say the Hebrew work quoted has no existence, and that Mr. Browning’s stock of Hebrew was very small.[2]

Ogniben. (A Soul’s Tragedy.) He was the astute Pope’s legate who went to Faenza to suppress the insurrection. He smoothed matters by getting Chiappino to leave the city, and he then complacently went away, saying he had known “four-and-twenty leaders of revolt.”

Old Gandolf. (The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church.) The Bishop’s predecessor in his see, and the man whose tomb he desires to outdo.

Old Pictures in Florence. (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) On a warm March morning the poet from a height looks down upon Florence, gleaming in the translucent air, with all the glory of the beautiful city lying on the mountain side; and of all he saw the startling bell-tower of Giotto was the best to see. But he reproaches Giotto because he has played him false. This was unkind, as he loved him so. And this reflection, in its turn, leads him to think upon Giotto’s brother artists. He recalls the ancient masters, and sees them haunting the churches and cloisters where their work was done, and lamenting the decay and neglect of their frescoes. In particular, he reflects on the wronged great soul of a painter whose work is peeling from the walls,—“a lion who dies of an ass’s kick.” The world wrongs its forgotten great souls, and hums round its famous Michael Angelos and its Raphaels; but perhaps they do not regard it, safe in heaven seeing God face to face, and all, as Browning hopes, attained to be poets. He thinks they can hardly be “quit of a world where their work is all to do,” where the little wits have no ability to understand the relationship of artist to artist, and how one whom the world is pleased to honour derives in direct line from another who is forgotten. Not a word is heard now of men who in their day were as famous as the rest—Stefano, for example,—

He then reflects on the development of the artist Greek art reuttered the truth of man, and Soul and Limbs, each betokened by the other, were made new in marble. Our weakness is tested by the strength, our meagre charms by the beauty of the matchless forms of Greek sculpture. This taught us the perfection of the body, but the artists one day awoke to the beauty and perfection of Soul, and then they worked for eternity, as the Greeks for time. This Greek art was perfect; these bodies could be no more beautiful. Consequently, so far there was arrest of development; they could never change, being whole and complete. Having learned all they have to teach, we shall see their work abolished. But in painting Souls, the artificer’s hand can never be arrested, for soul develops eternally, and things learned on earth are practised in heaven. This is illustrated by the case of Giotto. At a stroke he drew a perfect ⵔ. This could be done no better: it was perfect, complete, not to be surpassed. But Giotto planned a bell-tower, wonderful for beauty, but not even yet completed. The conception outran the power to bring to perfection. Round O’s can be completed; campaniles are still to finish. And so the Greeks finished their bodies. The early masters who began by depicting souls have their work still to finish. Their work is not completed—can, in fact, never be finished—because the soul is infinite. No doubt, he says, the early painters had to meet the objection, “What more can you want than Greek art?” They answered, “To paint man—to make his new hopes shine through his flesh.” New fears glorify his rags. To bring the invisible full into daylight, what matters if the visible go to the dogs? How much they dared, these early masters! The first of this new development, however imperfect, beats the best of the old. Then he reflects that there is a fancy which some lean to (it is an Eastern fancy, now popularised by the Theosophists), that when this life is over we shall begin a fresh succession of lives—lives wherein we shall repeat in large what here we practise in little; and so through an infinite series of lives on a scale that is to be changed. But this is not at all to the poet’s mind. He thinks he has learned his lesson here. He has seen

and considers that the uses of labour may consequently be garnered. He hopes there is rest; he has had troubles enough. And now he turns away from abstract conceptions on this deep problem to concrete matters—to the actual men who have carved and painted the forms he loves; and he brings up the memories of Nicolo the Pisan sculptor, and of the painter Cimabue, and goes on to speak of Ghiberti and Ghirlandajo. Alas! their ghosts are watching their peeling frescoes, their blistered or whitewashed works. He recalls the names of many a draughtsman and craftsman whose works are left to stealers and dealers. Suddenly the poet remembers the grudge he has against Giotto. There was a precious little picture, which Michael Angelo eyed like a lover, which was lost, but which has just turned up; and Browning wanted it, he thinks that he ought to have been prompted by the spirit of Giotto to go to the right quarter for it, and now it is sold—to whom?—he cannot discover. But he shall have it yet, his jewel! Then he expresses his hope that Italy may soon see the last of the hated Austrian; and then what will not the new Italian republic accomplish for man and art. The Bell-tower of Giotto shall soar up to its proper stature,

He wonders if he will be alive the morning the scaffold is taken down, and the golden hope of the world springs from its sleep.

Notes.—Verse 8, Da Vinci: Leonardo Da Vinci, born 1452, died 1519, artist, sculptor, architect, musician, and man of letters; in addition to these he was a scientist and explorer. 9, Dello, the Florentine painter, born towards the end of the fourteenth century, registered under the name of Dello di Niccolo Delli. He was a sculptor as well as a painter, and was employed by the king of Spain: Stefano: a celebrated Italian painter of Florence (1301?-1350?); his naturalism earned him the title of “Scimia della Natura” (Ape of Nature). Vasari says, “He not only surpassed all those who preceded him in the art, but left even his master, Giotto himself, far behind. Thus he was considered, and with justice, to be the best of all the painters who had appeared down to that time.” He excelled in perspective and foreshortening; Nature’s Ape: Christofano Landino, in the Apology preceding his commentary on Dante, says, “Stefano is called ‘The Ape of Nature’ by every one, so accurately does he express whatever he designs to represent”; Vasari, Georgio, the author of the Lives of the Painters; Theseus, one of the statues of the Parthenon of Athens, now in the British Museum. 13, Son of Priam == Paris; Apollo, the snake-slayer, the Belvedere as described in the Iliad; Niobe, chief figure of the celebrated group of statues “Niobe all tears for her children,” in the Uffizi gallery at Florence; the Racer’s frieze of the Parthenon; dying Alexander, a fine piece of ancient Greek sculpture at Florence. 17, Giotto and the “ⵔ”: Pope Benedict XI. sent a messenger to Giotto to bring him a proof of the painter’s power. Giotto refused to give him any further example of his talents than a ⵔ, drawn with a free sweep of the brush from the elbow. The Pope was satisfied, and engaged Giotto at a great salary to adorn the palace at Avignon (Professor Colvin); Campanile, the bell-tower by the side of the Duomo at Florence. This is greatly praised by Ruskin, who says: “The characteristics of power and beauty occur more or less in different buildings, some in one and some in another. But altogether, and all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building of the world—the Campanile of Giotto.” 23, Nicolo the Pisan: born between 1205 and 1207, died 1278; a sculptor and architect; Cimabue, Giotto’s teacher (1240-1302), the great art reformer; Ghiberti, Lorenzo (1381-1455): he executed the wonderful bronze gates of the Baptistery at Florence, which were said by Michael Angelo to be worthy to have been the gates of Paradise; Ghirlandajo, Domenico, Florentine painter (1449-98), was the son of Tommaso del Ghirlandajo. 26, Bigordi: this is stated by some to have been the family name of Ghirlandajo, but it is disputed; Sandro Botticelli, born at Florence in 1457, died 1515; a celebrated Florentine painter; “the wronged Lippino,” or Filippo Lippi, known as Filippino or Lippino (1460-1505), a Florentine painter, son of Fra Lippo Lippi. Some of his pictures were attributed to other artists, hence the expression “wronged”; Frà Angelico (1387-1455)—Il Beato Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole—was the great Dominican Friar-Painter of Florence, the greatest of all painters of sacred subjects. He was a most holy man, shunning all advancement, and devoted to the poor. He never painted without fervent prayer; Taddeo Gaddi: an Italian painter and architect of the Florentine school (1300-1366), son of Gaddo Gaddi; he was one of Giotto’s assistants for twenty-four years; when Giotto died he carried on the work of the Campanile; intonaco, rough cast, plaster, paint; Jerome, St. Jerome, the translator of the Scriptures into Latin; Lorenzo Monaco, Don Lorenzo, painter and monk, of the Angeli of Florence. First noticed as a painter, 1410. He executed many works in the Camaldoline monastery of his order. He was highly esteemed for his goodness. Verse 27, Pollajolo, Antonio (1433-98), a great painter and sculptor of Florence. He began life, as many of the great Italian artists did, as a goldsmith; tempera, a mixture of water and the yoke of eggs—used to give body to colours: the same as distemper; Alesso Baldovinetti, a Florentine painter (1422-99): he worked in fresco and mosaic. 28, Margheritone of Arezzo, painter, sculptor, and architect (1236-1313); held in high estimation by painters who worked in the Greek manner. He was the first in painting on wood to cover the surface with canvas; barret, a cloak. 29, Zeno, the founder of the sect of the Stoics; Carlino, a painter. 30, “a certain precious little tablet,” a lost picture which turned up while Mr. Browning was in Florence; Buonarroti == Michael Angelo. 31, San Spirito == “Holy Spirit,” a church in Florence, so named; Ognissanti == “All Saints’,” name of a church of Florence; “Detur amanti,” let it be given to the lover; “Jewel of Giamschid”: Byron calls it “the jewel of Giamschid,” Beckford “the carbuncle of Giamschid” (see Brewer’s Reader’s Handbook); Persian Sofi, the name of a dynasty (1499-1736). 32, “worst side of Mont St. Gothard,” the Swiss side; Radetzky, Count, field-marshal Austria (1766-1858), and famous in the wars against the insurrections against Austria by the Lombardians; Morello, a mountain near Florence; 33, Witanagemot, the great national council, the assent of which was necessary for all the laws of the Anglo-Saxon kings; so in Mrs. Browning’s poem she refers to “a parliament of lovers of Italy”; Ex: “Casa Guidi”: Mrs. Browning’s noble poem on Italian liberty; “quod videas ante,” the which see above; Loraine’s, i.e., the Guises of unrivalled eminence in the sixteenth century; Orgagna (1315-76), a painter of Florence. 34, prologuize, to introduce with a formal preface; Chimæra, a fabulous animal. 35, “curt Tuscan”: Tuscan is the literary language of Italy, therefore more dignified and freer from colloquialisms and vulgarisms than more modern forms; -issimo, termination of the superlative degree; Cambuscan, king of Sarra, in Tartary, the model of all royal virtues (see Brewer’s Handbook); “alt to altissimo,” high to the highest; beccaccia, a woodcock; “Duomo’s fit ally”: Giotto’s lovely Bell-tower is a fit companion to the cathedral; braccia, a cubit.

“O Lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird.” The first line of the invocation to the spirit of Mrs. Browning in Book I. of The Ring and the Book. Some stupid readers have thought this poem an invocation to our Lord, catching at the words “to drop down, to toil for man, to suffer, or to die.” They thought they detected some familiar words heard in church; and one incompetent critic went so far as to write, “Though Lyric Love is here a quality personified, it seems to be so interchangeably with Christ.... This is the interpretation we attach to the lines, though we have heard that some interpreters have actually considered them to be addressed to his wife!” (The Religion of our Literature, by George McCrie, p. 87.) There is really no difficulty about the lines until we come to parse them. Dr. Furnivall has done this in his grammatical analysis of the poem (Browning Society’s Papers, No. IX., p. 165). An old lady who had read and profited by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was advised to read Dr. Cheever’s Lectures in explanation of the allegory; asked how she liked the latter work, she said she understood the Pilgrim’s Progress, and hoped, before she died, to understand Dr. Cheever’s interpretation. I think I understand ‘O Lyric Love’: I can never hope to understand Dr. Furnivall’s analysis. It was called, at the time he wrote it, “Furnivall’s Jubilee Puzzle.”

“Once I saw a Chemist take a Pinch of Powder” (Ferishtah’s Fancies). The first line of the eighth lyric.

One Way Of Love. (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A song of unrequited love. The lover has strewn the month’s wealth of June roses on his lady’s path: she passes them without notice. For months he has striven to learn the lute: she will not listen to his music. His whole life long he has learned to love, and he has lost. Let roses lie, let music’s wing be folded: he will but say how blest are they who win her. A noble, dignified way of accepting defeat in love! Another Way of Love is a sequel to this poem. In this case the roses of June are actually tiresome to the man to whom they are offered. The woman in the first poem did not notice her roses, the man in the sequel confesses himself weary of their charms. His lady is satirical at his expense, and severely says he may go, and she will be recompensed if June mend the bower which his hand has rifled. June may also bestow her favours on a more appreciative recipient. She may also revenge herself by the lightning she uses to clear away insects and other rose-bower spoilers.

Note.—Verse 2, Eadem semper, always the same.

One Word More. (To E. B. B. [Elizabeth Barrett Browning], 1855.) This poem was originally appended to the collection of poems called Men and Women (q.v.) Browning’s Men and Women, containing amongst other noble poems his Epistle to Karshish, Cleon, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Andrea del Sarto, were fifty in number, and the concluding poem, One Word More, formed the dedication to his wife. The volume was in one sense a return for her Sonnets from the Portuguese, in which she poured out her love to Mr. Browning. In this poem he not less warmly declares his love for his wife, his “moon of poets.” The dedication is happy, because his interest in men and women had been quickened and deepened by his marriage. They had studied human nature together, and each poetic soul had reacted upon the other. He explains why he has desired to give something of his best, some gift which is not a gift to the world but to the woman he loves; and as the meanest of God’s creatures—

The poor workman, the most unskilful artisan, will strive to do something which shall express his utmost effort, to present to his love, and the greatest geniuses of the world have been actuated by a similar motive. Raphael, not content with painting, must pour out his soul in poetry for the woman of his heart (did she love the volume of a hundred sonnets all her life?), and Mr. Browning says he and his poet-wife would rather read that volume than wonder at the Madonnas by which his name will be ever known. But that volume will never be read. Guido Reni treasured it, but, as treasures do disappear, it vanished. Dante once proposed to paint for Beatrice an angel—traced it perchance with the corroded pen with which he pricked the stigma in the brow of the wicked—“Dante, who loved well because he hated”: hating only wickedness, and that because it hinders loving. Mr. Browning would rather study that angel than read a fresh Inferno, but that picture we shall never see. No artist lives and loves who desires not for once and for one to express himself in a language natural to him and the occasion, but which to others is but an art; and so the painter will forgo his painting and write a poem, the writer will try to paint a picture “once and for one only”—

Why is this? When a man comes before the world as leader, teacher, prophet, artist or poet, in any capacity which is his proper business, he is open to the unsympathetic criticism of a world which is ever exacting and always ungrateful in exact proportion to the magnitude of the work done for it. Under these circumstances the real self in the man seldom appears; when, however, he presents himself before the sympathetic soul of the woman who loves him, he no longer works for the critic, no longer acts a part, no longer appears in a character distasteful to himself. When Moses smote the rock and saved the Israelites, he had mocking and sneering for his reward: the ungrateful and unbelieving multitude behaved after their manner. Could Moses forget the ancient wrong he bore about him? Dare the man ever put off the prophet? But were there in all that crowd a woman’s face—a woman he could love—he would for her sake lay down the wonder-working rod, for he would be as the camel giving up its store of water with its life. But the poet says he shall never paint pictures, carve statues, nor express himself in music: for his wife he stands on his power of verse alone, and so he bids her take the lines of this love poem, which he has written for her, as the artist in fresco will steal a hair-pencil and cramp his spirit into missal painting for his lady, and the musician who sounds the martial strain will breathe his love through silver to serenade his princess; so he—the Browning men knew for other work—may this once whisper a love song to the ear of his wife. He will speak to her not dramatically, as he spoke in the poems in his book, but in his own true person. She knows him under both aspects, as the moon of Florence is the same which shines in London, though she has put off her Italian glory, and hurries dispiritedly through the gloomy skies of England. Could the moon really love a mortal, she has a side she could turn towards him, unseen as yet by herdsman or astronomer on his turret. Dumb to Homer, to Keats even, she would speak to him. And so the poet has for his love

the novel

Notes.—Verse 2, Century of Sonnets. I can find no evidence that Raphael wrote a hundred sonnets. Some three, or at most four, are all about which I can find anything. Michael Angelo wrote many impassioned sonnets, and was undoubtedly a fine poet; but if Raphael wrote many sonnets, they are, as Mr. Browning says, lost. Probably the whole story is an example of poetical licence. There is a very mediocre sonnet (as Mr. Samuel Waddington describes it in the notes to his Sonnets of Europe) by Raphael, which he has inscribed on one of his drawings now exhibited at the British Museum:—

“There are also two other sonnets,” says Mr. Waddington, “attributed to Raphael, but they can hardly be considered worthy of his illustrious name.” Raphael’s “lady of the sonnets” was Margherita (La Fornarina), the baker’s daughter, of whom Raphael was devotedly fond, and whose likeness appears in several of his most celebrated pictures. “Else he only used to draw Madonnas:” Mrs. Jameson, in her Legends of the Madonna, gives the following list of Raphael’s famous Madonnas: del Baldacchino, delle Candelabre, del Cardellino, della Famiglia Alva, di Foligno, de Giglio, del Passeggio, dell’ Pesce, della Seggiola, di San Sisto. Verse 3, “Her San Sisto names”: the Madonna di S. Sisto is the glory of the Dresden gallery. Little is known of its history; no studies or sketches of it exist. It much resembles the Madonna di Foligno, but is less injured by restoration. “Her, Foligno”: the Madonna di Foligno was dedicated by Sigismund Corti, of Foligno, private secretary to Pope Julius II., and a distinguished patron of learning. Sigismund, having been in danger, vowed an offering to Our Lady, to whom he attributed his escape. The picture is in the Vatican. It was painted in 1511. “Her that visits Florence in a Vision”: Mr. Browning, in a letter to Mr. W. J. Rolfe, said: “The Madonna at Florence is that called del Granduca, which represents her ‘as appearing to a votary in a vision’—so say the describers; it is in the earlier manner, and very beautiful.” It is in the Pitti Palace, Florence. Painted about 1506. “Her that’s left with lilies in the Louvre” (Paris): on this Mr. Browning explained that, “I think I meant La Belle Jardinière—but am not sure—from the picture in the Louvre.” This is a group of three figures: the Mother and Child and St. John. Painted in 1508. Verse 4, “That volume Guido Reni ... guarded”: this does not appear to have been a book of Sonnets, as Browning says, but a volume with a hundred designs drawn by Raphael. Reni left this book to his heir Signorini. Verse 5, “Dante once prepared to paint an angel”: Dante was master of all the science of his time. He was a skilful draughtsman, and tells us that on the anniversary of the death of Beatrice he drew an angel on a tablet. He was an intimate friend of Giotto, who has recorded that it was from him he drew the inspiration of the allegories of Virtue and Vice for the frescoes of the Scrovegni Palace at Padua. He was also a musician. Verse 7, Bice is Beatrice, Dante’s “gentle love.” Verse 9, “Egypt’s flesh-pots” (Exod. xvi. 3). Verse 10, “Sinai-forehead’s cloven brilliance” (Exod. xxxiv. 29, 30). Verse 11, Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses (Exod. iii. 1); “Æthiopian bond-slave” (Numb. xii. 1). Verse 14, “Karshish, Cleon, Norbert, and the Fifty”: there is a distinct caution here to those who seek for Browning’s real opinions on religion and the various subjects with which he deals, that he is speaking dramatically in these poems, and not “in his true person.” Verse 15, Samminiato == San Miniato, a well-known church in Florence. Verse 16, “Zoroaster on his terrace”: the celebrated founder of the doctrine of the Persian Magi. Very little is known about him personally, but his religion is well understood. Ancient historians say he lived five thousand years before the Trojan War. His scriptures are the Zend Avesta. He studied at night the aspect of the heavens. “Galileo on his turret”: Galileo, as an astronomer, required an observatory. Keats: Browning was much influenced by “the human rhythm” of Keats. There is abundant trace of this in Pauline, and in the second of the Paracelsus songs, “Heap cassia, sandal-buds, etc.” “Moonstruck mortal”: see Keats’ poem Endymion, the fable of Endymion’s amours with Diana, or the Moon. The fable probably originated from Endymion’s study of astronomy requiring him to pass the night on a high mountain, to observe the heavenly bodies. “Paved work of a sapphire” (Exod. xxiv. 10). Mr. W. M. Rossetti explains some of the allusions in this poem in the Academy for January 10th, 1891:—“I understand the allusions, but Browning is far from accurate in them. 1. Towards the end of the Vita Nuova, Dante says that, on the first anniversary of the death of Beatrice, he began drawing an angel, but was interrupted by certain people of distinction, who entered on a visit. Browning is therefore wrong in intimating that the angel was painted ‘to please Beatrice.’ 2. Then Browning says that the pen with which Dante drew the angel was perhaps corroded by the hot ink in which it had previously been dipped for the purpose of denouncing a certain wretch—i.e., one of the persons named in his Inferno. This about the ink, as such, is Browning’s own figure of speech not got out of Dante. 3. Then Browning speaks of Dante’s having ‘his left hand i’ the hair o’ the wicked,’ etc. This refers to Inferno, Canto 32, where Dante meets (among the traitors to their country) a certain Bocca degli Abati, a notorious Florentine traitor, dead some years back, and Dante clutches and tears at Bocca’s hair to compel him to name himself, which Bocca would much rather not do. 4. Next Browning speaks of this Bocca as being a ‘live man.’ Here Browning confounds two separate incidents. Bocca is not only damned, but also dead; but further on (Canto 33) Dante meets another man, a traitor against his familiar friend. This traitor is Frate Alberigo, one of the Manfredi family of Faenza. This Frate Alberigo was, though damned, not, in fact, dead; he was still alive, and Dante makes it out that traitors of this sort are liable to have their souls sent to hell before the death of their bodies. A certain Bianca d’Oria, Genoese, is in like case—damned but not dead. 5. Browning proceeds to speak of ‘the wretch going festering through Florence.’ This is a relapse into his mistake—the confounding of the dead Florentine Bocca degli Abati with the living (though damned) Faentine and Genoese traitors, Frate Alberigo and Bianca d’Oria, who had nothing to do with Florence.”

On the Poet, Objective and Subjective; on the latter’s Aim; on Shelley as Man and Poet. By Robert Browning. (The introductory essay to Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Moxon: 1852.) Dr. Furnivall says: “The cause of Browning’s writing this essay was (I believe) as follows:—In or before 1851, a forger clever enough to take in the publishers wrote some ‘letters of Shelley and Byron.’ Moxon bought the forged Shelley letters, and John Murray the Byron ones. Before they were proved spurious, Moxon printed the Shelley letters, and got Browning to write an introductory essay to them. Murray was slower, and, by the discovery of the forgery, was saved the exposure and annoyance that Moxon incurred in publishing, and then having to suppress, his book. The spurious Shelley letters were, as might have been expected, nugatory, barren of any new revelations of Shelley’s character. Browning could actually make nothing of them, and therefore wrote his Essay, not on the Letters, but on the two classes of poets, objective and subjective, and on Shelley. He wanted a chance of writing on the poet he admired; the Letters gave him the chance; and, being told that they were genuine, he accepted them as such without inquiry. Moreover, being in Paris at the time, he had no opportunity of consulting English experts, had even any suspicion of forgery crossed his mind. The worth of his Essay is no way weakened by its having been set before spurious letters.” A brief extract from Mr. Browning’s Essay will indicate his estimate of the poetic method which he selected as his own. Speaking of the subjective poet, he says: “He, gifted like the objective poet with the fuller perception of nature and man, is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below, as to the One above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth—an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained by the poet’s own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees—the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly in the Divine Hand—it is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity he has to do; and he digs where he stands—preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires to perceive and speak. Such a poet does not deal habitually with the picturesque groupings and tempestuous tossings of the forest-trees, but with their roots and fibres naked to the chalk and stone. He does not paint pictures and hang them on the walls, but rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes: we must look deep into his human eyes to see those pictures on them. He is rather a seer, accordingly, than a fashioner; and what he produces will be less a work than an effluence. That effluence cannot be easily considered in abstraction from his personality,—being indeed the very radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it but not separated.” In these words we have not only Mr. Browning’s defence of his work (if any could be needed), but an explanation of the reason why he seems as much interested in dissecting the soul of a villain or a scamp as of a saint and hero. Count Guido in his complex wickedness, brooding in his prison cell, is more interesting to such an analyst than Pompilia fluttering her wings on the borders of heaven. The old roué in the Inn Album, has root fibres worth tracing till they grip the stones. Simple old Rabbi Ben Ezra has nothing to dissect; his innocent soul lies basking in the smile of God. He has nothing to do with him but sit at his feet and listen. This “Essay on Shelley” has been reprinted and published in Part I. of the Browning Society’s Papers.

Optimism. Browning’s optimism is that which perhaps more than anything else distinguishes his whole work from first to last. Most eloquently has this been acknowledged by James Thomson, a pessimist of the pessimists. Unhappily he could not himself feel this confidence in “everything being for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” but he could admire it in another. “Browning,” he said, “has conquered life, instead of being conquered by it: a victory so rare as to be almost unique, especially among poets in these latter days.” It would be easy to give examples of Browning’s optimism, which would fill many pages of this work. The following will suffice:—

Orchestrion. The musical instrument invented by Abt Vogler (q.v.).

Ottima. (Pippa Passes.) The woman who, with her paramour Sebald, murdered her husband Luca.

“Overhead the Tree-Tops meet.” (Pippa Passes.) Pippa sings these words as she passes the Bishop’s house.

“Over the Sea our Galleys went.” (Paracelsus.) The hero sings the song of which these are the opening words in Part IV., Paracelsus Aspires.

Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper. (Published July 1876, in a volume with Other Poems.) They were: “At the Mermaid,” “Home,” “Ship,” “Pisgah-Sights,” “Fears and Scruples,” “Natural Magic,” “Magical Nature,” “Bifurcation,” “Numpholeptos,” “Appearances,” “St. Martin’s Summer,” “Hervé Riel,” “A Forgiveness,” “Cenciaja,” “Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial,” “Epilogue.”

Pacchiarotto (or Pacchiarotti) Jacopo, has been confused in history with Girolamo del Pacchia, and this fact is referred to in the beginning of the poem. The following account of these painters, who lived about the same time, from the Encyclopædia Britannica, will help to clear the way for the comprehension of this rather difficult poem,—difficult not on account of the story, which is told clearly enough, but for the extraneous matter with which it is intermingled.

[The Man.] “Pacchia, Girolamo Del, and Pacchiarotto (or Pacchiarotti) Jacopo. These are two painters of the Sienese school, whose career and art-work have been much mis-stated till late years. One or other of them produced some good pictures, which used to pass as the performance of Perugino; reclaimed from Perugino, they were assigned to Pacchiarotto; now it is sufficiently settled that the good works are by G. del Pacchia, while nothing of Pacchiarotto’s own doing transcends mediocrity. The mythical Pacchiarotto, who worked actively at Fontainebleau, has no authenticity. Girolamo del Pacchia, son of a Hungarian cannon-founder, was born probably in Siena, in 1477. Having joined a turbulent club named the Bardotti, he disappeared from Siena in 1535, when the club was dispersed, and nothing of a later date is known of him. His most celebrated work is a fresco of the Nativity of the Virgin, in the chapel of St. Bernardino, Siena: graceful and tender, with a certain artificiality. Another renowned fresco, in the church of St. Catherine, represents that saint on her visit to St. Agnes of Montepulciano, who, having just expired, raises her foot by miracle. In the National Gallery of London there is a Virgin and Child. The forms of G. del Pacchia are fuller than those of Perugino (his principal model of style appears to have been in reality Francialigio); the drawing is not always unexceptionable. The female heads have sweetness and beauty of feature, and some of the colouring has noticeable force. Pacchiarotto was born in Siena in 1474. In 1530 he took part in the conspiracy of the Libertini and Popolani, and in 1533 he joined the Bardotti. He had to hide for his life in 1535, and was concealed by the Observantine fathers in a tomb in the church of St. John. He was stuffed in close to a new-buried corpse, and got covered with vermin and dreadfully exhausted by the close of the second day. After a while he resumed work. He was exiled in 1539, but recalled in the following year; and in that year, or soon afterwards, he died. Among the few extant works with which he is still credited is an Assumption of the Virgin, in the Carmine of Siena.”

[The Poem.] Pacchiarotto must needs take up “Reform.” He thought it was his vocation to set things in general to rights. The world he considered needed reforming, and he was quite ready to undertake the task. He found mankind stubborn, however, and not much inclined to listen to him. So he constructed himself a workshop, and painted its walls in fresco with all sorts and conditions of men, from beggar to noble. He drew kings, clowns, popes, emperors, priests, and ladies; then washed his brushes, cleaned his pallet, took off his working dress, and began to lecture his figures which he had painted. He put arguments into their mouths, and of course readily refuted them. He found his figures very meek and complaisant, and he had no trouble at all in disposing of their replies to his own satisfaction. He stripped them one by one of their “cant-clothed abuses,” exposed the sophistry of their excuses, and left their vices without a leg to stand upon. Paint-bred men being so easily upset, he was now prepared to deal with those of flesh and blood, so he wished mortar and paint good-bye and descended to the streets. It happened just at this time that there fell upon Siena a famine. This public distress afforded our artist his opportunity: he blamed the authorities for the famine, and set himself to the task of teaching them to manage things better. Now, there was at that time a club of disaffected citizens, who called themselves Bardotti, or “spare-horses”—those which walk by the side of the waggon drawn by the working team—horses doing nothing to draw the load, but ready in case of emergency. Such were these gentry; they did not work, but they were ready for such an emergency as the present. And their advice to the authorities was simply to turn things upside down, make servant master, poverty wealth, and wealth poverty; then things would be righted. Pacchiarotto placed himself in the midst of these folk, and suggested that what they wanted was the right man in the right place, and he was the right man. The words were not out of his mouth ere the Spare-Horses flew at him, and he had to run for his life. Looking everywhere for some place of shelter, he found himself at the cemetery of a Franciscan monastery; and the only place where he could hide himself with safety from the pursuers was in a vault with a recently-buried corpse, so he was obliged to creep through a hole in the brickwork and habituate himself to the strange bedfellow. In this stinking atmosphere, and covered with vermin from the corpse, he lay in misery for two days, praying the saints to set him free, and promising for ever to abandon the attempt to preach change to his fellow-citizens. When he was starved into sanity, he scrambled out of this loathsome hiding-place, looking like a spectre, only much more “alive.” He then found his way to the superior of the brotherhood, who had him well cleansed and rubbed with odoriferous unguents. They fed him, clothed him, and then he told his story all unvarnished. Be sure the good monk gave him sound advice. He told him how he had had hopes of converting men by his own preaching, and how hard he had found the task. He had come to the conclusion that work for work’s sake was the real need of men: let men work, but not dream, and they would succeed; if present success merely were intended, heaven would begin too soon. He advised him not to be a spare-horse, but a working-horse—to stick to his paint brush and work for his living. Pacchiarotto was mute; he had no need of conversion. He was reformed already, not by a live man’s arguments, but by the dead thing—the clay-cold grinning corpse, that had asked him why he was in such a hurry to leave the warm light and join him in the grave. The corpse had told him how earth was a place of rehearsal, at which things seldom go smoothly. The Author, no doubt, had His reasons, which would come out when the play was produced. Meanwhile he advised him not to interfere with its production; he was suffering from a swelling called Vanity, which he would prick and relieve him of. And so Pacchiarotto, having partaken of the monks’ good cheer, was restored to sanity and said good-bye. Mr. Browning now addresses his critics. He has told them a plain story, and tried therewith to content them. He considers them as an assembly of May-day sweeps, with tongs and bellows, calling at his house and announcing themselves as