Gerald's friends shared, according to him,
the opinion of Carlyle, who roundly pronounced it "without _Backbone_ or
basis of Common-sense," and "among the absurdest books ever written by a
gifted Man." Tennyson, however, admitted (to FitzGerald) that he "found
greatness" in it,[47] and Mr Swinburne was in the forefront of the
chorus of praise. The audience which now welcomed Browning was in fact
substantially that which had hailed the first fresh runnels of Mr
Swinburne's genius a few years before; the fame of both marked a wave of
reaction from the austere simplicity and attenuated sentiment of the
later _Idylls of the King_. Readers upon whom the shimmering
exquisiteness of Arthurian knighthood began to pall turned with relish
to Browning's Italian murder story, with its sensational crime, its
mysterious elopement, its problem interest, its engaging actuality.

[Footnote 47: W.M. Rossetti reports Browning to have told him, in a
call, March 15, 1868, that he "began it in October 1864. Was staying at
Bayonne, and walked out to a mountain-gorge traditionally said to have
been cut or kicked out by Roland, and there laid out the full plan of
his twelve cantos, accurately carried out in the execution." The date is
presumably an error of Rossetti's for 1862 (_Rossetti Papers_, p. 302).
Cf. Letter of Sept. 29, 1862 (Orr, p. 259).]

[Footnote 48: _More Letters_ of E.F.G.]

And undoubtedly this was part of the attraction of the theme for
Browning himself. He had inherited his father's taste for stories of
mysterious crime.[49] And to the detective's interest in probing a
mystery, which seems to have been uppermost in the elder Browning, was
added the pleader's interest in making out an ingenious and plausible
case for each party. The casuist in him, the lover of argument as such,
and the devoted student of Euripides,[50] seized with delight upon a
forensic subject which made it natural to introduce the various "persons
of the drama," giving their individual testimonies and "apologies." He
avails himself remorselessly of all the pretexts for verbosity, for
iteration, for sophistical invention, afforded by the cumbrous machinery
of the law, and its proverbial delay. Every detail is examined from
every point of view. Little that is sordid or revolting is suppressed.
But then it is assuredly a mistake to represent, with one of the
liveliest of Browning's recent exponents, that the story was for him,
even at the outset, in the sta