y, who is in league with the
police for the detection of Luigi, and with the Intendant for Pippa's
ruin; and the saving effect of Pippa's songs is the more dramatic that
it becomes on one occasion the means of betraying herself. She goes home
at sunset, unconscious of all she has effected and escaped, and
wondering how near she may ever come to touching for good or evil the
lives with which her fancy has been identifying her. "So far, perhaps,"
she says to herself, "that the silk she will wind to-morrow may some day
serve to border Ottima's cloak. And if it be only this!"

"All service ranks the same with God--
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last nor first." (vol. iii. p. 79.)

These are her last words as she lies down to sleep.

Pippa's songs are not impressive in themselves. They are made so in
every case by the condition of her hearer's mind; and the idea of the
story is obvious, besides being partly stated in the heroine's own
words. No man is "great" or "small" in the sight of God--each life being
in its own way the centre of creation. Nothing should be "great" or
"small" in the sight of man; since it depends on personal feeling, or
individual circumstance, whether a given thing will prove one or the
other.

"KING VICTOR AND KING CHARLES" is an historical tragedy in two divisions
and four parts, of which the time is 1730 and 31, and the place the
castle of Rivoli near Turin. The episode which it records may be read in
any chronicle of the period; and Mr. Browning adds a preface, in which
he justifies his own view of the characters and motives involved in it.
King Victor II. (first King of Sardinia) was sixty-four years old, and
had been nominally a ruler from the age of ten, when suddenly (1730) he
abdicated in favour of his son Charles. The Queen was dead, and he had
privately married a lady of the Court, to whom he had been long
attached; and the desire to acknowledge this union, combined with what
seems to have been a premature old age, might sufficiently have
explained the abdication; but Mr. Browning adopts the idea, which for a
time found favour, that it had a deeper cause: that the King's
intriguing ambition had involved him in many difficulties, and he had
devised this plan for eluding them.

Charles has become his father's heir through the death of an older and
better loved son. He has been thrust into the shade by the favourite,
now Victor's wif