many vivid traces in the poetry of the following year. Among
these was the drama of _Luria_, ultimately published as the concluding
number of the _Bells_.

In this remarkable drama Browning turned once more to the type of
historical tragedy which he had originally essayed in _Strafford_. The
fall of a man of passionate fidelity through the treachery of the prince
or the people in whom he has put his trust, was for Browning one of the
most arresting of the great traditional motives of tragic drama. He
dwelt with emphasis upon this aspect of the fate of Charles's great
minister; in _Luria_, where he was working uncontrolled by historical
authority, it is the fundamental theme. At the same time the effect is
heightened by those race contrasts which had been so abundantly used in
_The Return of the Druses_. Luria is a Moor who has undertaken the
service of Florence, and whose religion it is to serve her. Like
Othello,[22] he has been intrusted, alien as he is, by a jealous and
exacting State, with the supreme command of her military forces, a
position in which the fervour of the Oriental and the frank simplicity
of the soldier inevitably lie open to the subtle strategy of Italians
and statesmen. "Luria," wrote Browning, while the whole scheme was "all
in my brain yet, ... devotes himself to something he thinks Florence,
and the old fortune follows, ... and I will soon loosen my Braccio and
Puccio (a pale discontented man) and Tiburzio (the Pisan, good true
fellow, this one), and Domizia the lady--loosen all these on dear
foolish (ravishing must his folly be) golden-hearted Luria, all these
with their worldly wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways." Florence, in short,
plays collectively somewhat the part of Iago to this second Othello, but
of an Iago (need it be said) immeasurably less deeply rooted in
malignity than Shakespeare's. It was a source of weakness as well as of
strength in Browning as a dramatist that the evil things in men
dissolve so readily under his scrutiny as if they were mere shells of
flimsy disguise for the "soul of goodness" they contain. He has, in
fact, put so much strong sense on the side of the jealous Florentine
masters of his hero that his own sympathies were divided, with
paralysing effect, it would seem, upon his interest in drama.[23] Even
the formidable antagonism of Braccio, the Florentine Commissary, is
buttressed, if not based, upon a resolve to defend the rights of
civilisation against militarism