l games. This is no exaggerated account of what
is done in these poems. Three people, even when the poems are
monologues, are arguing in them, and Browning plays all their hands,
even in _The Inn Album_, which is not a monologue. In _Red Cotton
Nightcap Country_, when he has told the story of the man and woman in
all its sordid and insane detail, with comments of his own, he brings
the victim of mean pleasure and mean superstition to the top of the
tower whence he throws himself down, and, inserting his intelligence
into the soul of the man, explains his own view of the situation. In
_Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau_, we have sometimes what Browning really
thinks, as in the beginning of the poem, about the matter in hand, and
then what he thinks the Prince would think, and then, to complicate the
affair still more, the Prince divides himself, and makes a personage
called _Sagacity_ argue with him on the whole situation. As to _Fifine
at the Fair_--a poem it would not be fair to class altogether with
these--its involutions resemble a number of live eels in a tub of water.
Don Juan changes his personality and his views like a player on the
stage who takes several parts; Elvire is a gliding phantom with gliding
opinions; Fifine is real, but she remains outside of this shifting
scenery of the mind; and Browning, who continually intrudes, is
sometimes Don Juan and sometimes himself and sometimes both together,
and sometimes another thinker who strives to bring, as in the visions
in the poem, some definition into this changing cloudland of the brain.
And after all, not one of the questions posed in any of the poems is
settled in the end. I do not say that the leaving of the questions
unsettled is not like life. It is very like life, but not like the work
of poetry, whose high office it is to decide questions which cannot be
solved by the understanding.

Bishop Blongram thinks he has proved his points. Gigadibs is half
convinced he has. But the Bishop, on looking back, thinks he has not
been quite sincere, that his reasonings were only good for the occasion.
He has evaded the centre of the thing. What he has said was no more than
intellectual fencing. It certainly is intellectual fencing of the finest
kind. Both the Bishop and his companion are drawn to the life; yet, and
this is the cleverest thing in the poem, we know that the Bishop is in
reality a different man from the picture he makes of himself. And the
truth which in his t