that to touch Pompilia's bedclothes would cure her
palsy, Cavalier Carlo who fees the porter to paint her face just because
she was murdered and famous, the folk who argue on theology over her
wounded body. Elsewhere we possess the life-history of Pietro and
Violante, Pompilia's reputed parents; several drawings of the retired
tradesmen class, with their gossips and friends, in the street of a poor
quarter in Rome; then, the Governor and Archbishop of Arezzo, the friar
who is kindly but fears the world and all the busy-bodies of this
provincial town. Arezzo, its characters and indwellers, stand in clear
light. The most vivid of these sketches is Dominus Hyacinthus, the
lawyer who defends Guido. I do not know anything better done, and more
amusingly, than this man and his household--a paternal creature, full of
his boys and their studies, making us, in his garrulous pleasure, at
home with them and his fat wife. Browning was so fond of this sketch
that he drew him and his boys over again in the epilogue.

These represent the episodical characters in this drama of life; and
Browning has scattered them, as it were, behind the chief characters,
whom sometimes they illustrate and sometimes they contrast. Of these the
whitest, simplest, loveliest is Pompilia, of whom I have already
written. The other chief characters are Count Guido and Giuseppe
Caponsacchi; and to the full development of these two characters
Browning gives all his powers. They are contrasted types of the spirit
of good and the spirit of evil conquering in man. Up to a certain point
in life their conduct is much alike. Both belong to the Church--one as a
priest, one as a layman affiliated to the Church. The lust of money and
self, when the character of Pompilia forces act, turns Guido into a
beast of greed and hate. The same character, when it forces act, lifts
Caponsacchi into almost a saint. This was a piece of contrasted
psychology in which the genius of Browning revelled, and he followed all
the windings of it in both these hearts with the zest of an explorer.
They were labyrinthine, but the more labyrinthine the better he was
pleased. Guido's first speech is made before the court in his defence.
We see disclosed the outer skin of the man's soul, all that he would
have the world know of him--cynical, mocking, not cruel, not
affectionate, a man of the world whom life had disappointed, and who
wishing to establish himself in a retired life by marriage had be