And never once does he detach his eye
From those ranged there to slay him or to save,
But does his best man's-service for himself."

His speech is a tissue of falsehoods and prevarications: if he uses a
fact, it is only to twist it into a form of self-justification. He knows
it is useless to deny the murder; his aim, then, is to explain and
excuse it. Every device attainable by the instinct and the brain of
hunted humanity he finds and uses. Now he slurs rapidly over an
inconvenient fact; now, with the frank audacity of innocence, proclaims
and blazons it abroad; now he is rhetorically eloquent, now ironically
pathetic; always contriving to shift the blame upon others, and to make
his own course appear the only one plausible or possible, the only one
possible, at least, to a high-born, law-abiding son of the Church. Every
shift and twist is subtly adapted to his audience of Churchmen, and the
gradation of his pleading no less subtly contrived. No keener and
subtler special pleading has ever been written, in verse certainly, and
possibly in lawyers' prose; and it is poetry of the highest order of
dramatic art.

Covering a narrower range, but still more significant within its own
limits, the speech of _Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, the priest who assisted
Pompilia in her flight to Rome (given now in her defence before the
judges who have heard the defence of Guido) is perhaps the most
passionate and thrilling piece of blank verse ever written by Browning.
Indeed, I doubt if it be an exaggeration to say that such fire, such
pathos, such splendour of human speech, has never been heard or seen in
English verse since Webster. In tone and colour the monologue is quite
new, exquisitely modulated to a surprising music. The lighter passages
are brilliant: the eloquent passages full of a fine austerity; but it is
in those passages directly relating to Pompilia that the chief greatness
of the work lies. There is in these appeals a quivering,
thrilling, searching quality of fervid pathetic directness: I can give no
notion of it in words; but here are a few lines, torn roughly out of
their context, which may serve in some degree to illustrate my
meaning:--

"Pompilia's face, then and thus, looked on me
The last time in this life: not one sight since,
Never another sight to be! And yet
I thought I had saved her. I appealed to Rome:
It seems I simply sent her to her death.
You tell me sh