Note 9 — FOURTH STUDY

The "Good News" is that of the "Pacification de Gant," concluded in 1576. It was a treaty of union between Holland, Zealand, and the southern Netherlands, against Spain, under tyrannical Philip II. The treaty was greeted rapturously by the frontier cities, because it was expected to free the Netherlands from Spanish power.

"There is," writes Mr. Browning, "no sort of historical foundation about 'Good News from Ghent.' I wrote it under the bulwark of a vessel off the African coast, after I had been at sea long enough to appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse 'York,' then in my stable at home. It was written in pencil on the fly-leaf of Bartoli's Simboli, I remember."

While there is, then, no historical foundation for the "gallop," the verisimilitude of the situation is perfect. Aix might easily have resolved to set herself on fire at a given hour, rather than submit herself and her citizens piecemeal to the torch of the persecutor. The "horse without peer" might possibly have galloped the ninety-odd miles between Ghent and Aix, but the feat would be a marvelous one.

This poem and "Hervé Riel," with the accompanying notes, are reprinted from Select Poems of Robert Browning, edited by William Rolfe, A.M., and Héloise E. Hersey, and published by Harper & Brothers.