e, and by the Minister d'Ormea; his sensitive nature
crushed into weakness, his loftiness of purpose never called into play.
He seems precisely the person of whom to make at once a screen and a
tool. But he has scarcely been crowned when it is evident that he will
be neither. He assumes the character of king at the same time as the
function; and by his honesty, courage, and humanity, restores the
prosperity of his country, and the honour of his house. He secures even
the devotion, interested though it be, of the unscrupulous d'Ormea
himself.

Victor, however, is restless in his obscurity; and by the end of the
year is scheming for the recovery of his crown. He presents himself
before his son, and demands that it be restored to him; denouncing what
he considers the weakness of King Charles' rule. Charles refuses, gently
but firmly, to abandon what has become for him the post of duty; and
King Victor departs, to conspire openly against him. D'Ormea is active
in detecting the conspiracy and unveiling it; and Victor is brought back
to the palace, this time a prisoner.

But Charles does not receive him as such. His filial piety is outraged
by the unnatural conflict; and his wife Polixena has vainly tried to
convince him that there is a higher because less obvious virtue in
resisting than in giving way. He once more acknowledges his father as
King. And both he and his wife are soon aware that in doing so, he is
only humouring the caprice of a dying man. "_I have no friend in the
wide world_ is the old King's cry. Give me what I have no power to take
from you."

"So few years give it quietly,
My son! It will drop from me. See you not?
A crown's unlike a sword to give away--
That, let a strong hand to a weak hand give!
But crowns should slip from palsied brows to heads
Young as this head:...." (vol. iii. p. 162-3.)

Charles places the crown on his father's head. A strange conflict of
gratified ambition, of remorseful tenderness, of dreamy regret, stirs
the failing spirit. But command and defiance flash out in the old King's
last words.

This death on the stage is the only point on which Mr. Browning diverges
from historical truth. King Victor lived a year longer, in a modified
captivity to which his son had most unwillingly consigned him; and he is
made to suggest this story in the half-insanity of his last moments as
one which may be told to t