they were changed before
publication, and are now in every case fictitious. The second edition of
Mrs. Orr's _Handbook_ contains a list of the real names, which I
subjoin.[49]

The book is dedicated to Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie), and the
whole story is supposed to be told to her (as in substance it was) by
Browning, who has thus given to the poem a tone of pleasant
colloquialism. Told as it is, it becomes in part a dramatic monologue of
which the _dramatis persona_ is Robert Browning. It is full of quiet,
sometimes grim, humour; of picturesque and witty touches; of pungency
and irony. Its manner, the humorous telling of a tragic tale, is a
little after the pattern of Carlyle. In such a setting the tragic
episodes, sometimes all but heroic, sometimes almost grotesque, have all
the impressiveness of contrast.

The story itself, in the main, is a sordid enough tragedy: like several
of Browning's later books, it is a study in evil. The two characters who
fill the stage of this little history are tragic comedians; they, too,
are "real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the
world by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us that fiction, if it can
imagine events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated,
can read us no such furrowing lesson in life." The character of Miranda,
the sinner who would reconcile sin with salvation, is drawn with special
subtlety; analysed, dissected rather, with the unerring scalpel of the
experienced operator. Miranda is swayed through life by two opposing
tendencies, for he is of mixed Castilian and French blood. He is
mastered at once by two passions, earthly and religious, illicit love
and Catholic devotion: he cannot let go the one and he will not let go
the other; he would enjoy himself on the "Turf" without abandoning the
shelter of the "Towers." His life is spent in trying to effect a
compromise between the two antagonistic powers which finally pull down
his house of life. Clara, his mistress-wife, is a mirror of himself; she
humours him, manages him, perhaps on his own lines of inclination.

"'But--loved him?' Friend, I do not praise her love!
True love works never for the loved one so,
Nor spares skin-surface, smoothening truth away,
Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace
Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself.
'Worship not me, but God!' the angels urge!"

This man and woman are analysed