rywhere comparative solitude. Here, in uninterrupted quiet, and in a
room devoted to his use, Mr. Browning would work till the afternoon was
advanced, and then set forth on a long walk over the cliffs, often in
the face of a wind which, as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean
against as if it were a wall. And during this time he was living, not
only in his work, but with the man who had inspired it. The image of
Aristophanes, in the half-shamed insolence, the disordered majesty, in
which he is placed before the reader's mind, was present to him from
the first moment in which the Defence was conceived. What was still more
interesting, he could see him, hear him, think with him, speak for him,
and still inevitably condemn him. No such instance of always ingenious,
and sometimes earnest pleading foredoomed to complete discomfiture,
occurs in Mr. Browning's works.

To Aristophanes he gave the dramatic sympathy which one lover of life
can extend to another, though that other unduly extol its lower forms.
To Euripides he brought the palm of the higher truth, to his work the
tribute of the more pathetic human emotion. Even these for a moment
ministered to the greatness of Aristophanes, in the tear shed by him to
the memory of his rival, in the hour of his own triumph; and we may be
quite sure that when Mr. Browning depicted that scene, and again when he
translated the great tragedian's words, his own eyes were dimmed. Large
tears fell from them, and emotion choked his voice, when he first
read aloud the transcript of the 'Herakles' to a friend, who was often
privileged to hear him.

Mr. Browning's deep feeling for the humanities of Greek literature, and
his almost passionate love for the language, contrasted strongly with
his refusal to regard even the first of Greek writers as models of
literary style. The pretensions raised for them on this ground were
inconceivable to him; and his translation of the 'Agamemnon', published
1877, was partly made, I am convinced, for the pleasure of exposing
these claims, and of rebuking them. His preface to the transcript gives
evidence of this. The glee with which he pointed to it when it first
appeared was no less significant.

At Villers, in 1875, he only corrected the proofs of 'The Inn Album' for
publication in November. When the party started for the Isle of Arran,
in the autumn of 1876, the 'Pacchiarotto' volume had already appeared.

When Mr. Browning discontinued his short-li