se you. I stopped here: and, Hob, do you the same!"

Straightway the son relaxed his hold of the father's throat.
They mounted, side by side, to the room again: no note
Took either of each, no sign made each to either: last
As first, in absolute silence, their Christmas-night they passed.

At dawn, the father sate on, dead, in the self-same place,
With an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting-face:
But the son crouched all a-tremble like any lamb new-yeaned.

When he went to the burial, someone's staff he borrowed--tottered
and leaned.
But his lips were loose, not locked,--kept muttering, mumbling.
"There!
At his cursing and swearing!" the youngsters cried: but the elders
thought "In prayer."
A boy threw stones: he picked them up and stored them in his vest.

So tottered, muttered, mumbled he, till he died, perhaps found rest.
"Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?" O Lear,
That a reason out of nature must turn them soft, seems clear!

In the "Inn Album," a degenerate type of Nineteenth-Century Englishman
is dissected with the keen knife of a surgeon, which Browning knows so
well how to wield. The villain of this poem was a real personage, a Lord
de Ros, a friend of the Duke of Wellington. The story belongs to the
annals of crime and is necessarily unpleasant, but in order to see how
Browning has worked up the episode it is interesting to know the bare
facts as Furnivall gives them in "Notes and Queries" March 25, 1876. He
says "that the gambling lord showed the portrait of the lady he had
seduced and abandoned and offered his dupe an introduction to her, as a
bribe to induce him to wait for payment of the money he had won; that
the young gambler eagerly accepted the offer; and that the lady
committed suicide on hearing of the bargain between them." Dr. Furnivall
heard the story from some one who well remembered the sensation it had
made in London years ago. In his management of the story, Browning has
intensified the villainy of the Lord at the same time that he has shown
a possible streak of goodness in him. The young man, on the other hand,
he has made to be of very good stuff, indeed, notwithstanding his year
of tutelage from the older man. He makes one radical change in the story
as well as several minor ones. In the poem the younger man had been in
love with the girl whom the older man had dishonorably