the students is in prose.

[52:2] The long shoaly island in the Lagoon, immediately opposite
Venice.

[64:1] This song refers to Catherine of Cornaro, the last Queen of
Cyprus, who came to her castle at Asolo when forced to resign her
kingdom to the Venetians in 1489. "She lived for her people's welfare,
and won their love by her goodness and grace."

[68:1] "The name means _Blue-Fox_, and is a skit on the _Edinburgh
Review_, which is bound in blue and fox" (Dr. Furnivall).

[77:1] The dialogue between Monsignor and the steward is in prose.

[77:2] Having made her Monsignor's niece, observes Mr. Chesterton,
"Browning might just as well have made Sebald her long-lost brother, and
Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married."

III

MILDRED TRESHAM

IN "A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON"

I have said that, to my perception, the most characteristic mark in
Browning's portrayal of women is his admiration for dauntlessness and
individuality; and this makes explicable to me the failure which I
constantly perceive in his dramatic presentment of her whose "innocence"
(as the term is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. The
type, immortal and essential, is one which a poet must needs essay to
show; and Browning, when he showed it through others, or in his own
person hymned it, found words for its delineation which lift the soul as
it were to morning skies. But when words are further called upon for its
_expression_, when such a woman, in short, has to speak for herself, he
rarely makes her do so without a certain consciousness of that especial
trait in her--and hence her speech must of necessity ring false, for
innocence knows nothing of itself.

So marked is this failure, to my sense, that I cannot refuse the
implication which comes along with it: that only theoretically, only as
it were by deference to others, did the attribute, in that particular
apprehension of it, move him to admiration. I do not, of course, mean
anything so inconceivable as that he questioned the loveliness of the
"pure in heart"; I mean merely that he questioned the artificial value
which has been set upon physical chastity--and that when departure from
this was the _circumstance_ through which he had to show the more
essential purity, his instinctive scepticism drove him to the forcing of
a note which was not really native to his voice. For always (to my
sense) when he presents dramatically a girl or woman in the grip of this