avage with iron bonds, exist for Caliban
only in the form of the faith held by his dam, which he puts aside in
the calm decisive way of a modern thinker, as one who has nothing to
fear from the penalties of heresy, and has even outlived the exultation
of free thought:--

"His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so;
Who made them weak, made weakness He might vex."

[Footnote 43: It is characteristic that M. Maeterlinck found no place
for Caliban in his striking fantasia on the _Tempest, Joyzelle_.]

Caliban's theology has, moreover, very real points of contact with
Browning's own. His god is that sheer Power which Browning from the
first recognised; it is because Setebos feels heat and cold, and is
therefore a weak creature with ungratified wants, that Caliban decides
there must be behind him a divinity that "all it hath a mind to, doth."
Caliban is one of Browning's most consummate realists; he has the
remorselessly vivid perceptions of a Lippo Lippi and a Sludge.
Browning's wealth of recondite animal and plant lore is nowhere else so
amazingly displayed; the very character of beast or bird will be hit off
in a line,--as the pie with the long tongue

"That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,"

or the lumpish sea-beast which he blinded and called Caliban (an
admirable trait)--

"A bitter heart that bides its time and bites."

And all this curious scrutiny is reflected in Caliban's god. The sudden
catastrophe at the close

("What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!")

is one of Browning's most superb surprises, breaking in upon the
leisured ease of theory with the suddenness of a horrible practical
emergency, and compelling Caliban, in the act of repudiating his
theology, to provide its most vivid illustration.

Shakespeare, with bitter irony, brought his half-taught savage into
touch with the scum of modern civilisation, and made them conspire
together against its benignity and wisdom. The reader is apt to remember
this conjunction when he passes from _Caliban_ to _Mr Sludge._ Stephano
and Trinculo, almost alone among Shakespeare's rascals, are drawn
without geniality, and Sludge is the only one of Browning's "casuists"
whom he treats with open scorn. That some of the effects were palpably
fraudulent, and that, fraud apart, there remained a residuum of
phenomena not easy to ex