in, with more of subtlety and of detachment, the problem of the
conventional conflict of love with duty, so peremptorily decided in
love's favour in _The Statue and the Bust_. _A Forgiveness_ is a
powerful reworking of the theme of _My Last Duchess_, with an added
irony of situation: Browning, who excels in the drama of silent
figures, has drawn none more effective than this guilty priest, who
grinds his teeth behind the confessional grating as he listens perforce
to the story of his own crime from the lips of the wronged husband,
still cherishing the hope that he is unrecognised, or at the worst may
elude vengeance in his cloister's solitude; until the avenger's last
words throw off the mask:--

"Hardly, I think! As little helped his brow
The cloak then, Father--as your grate helps now!"

From these high matters of passion and tragedy we pass by easy steps
into the jocular-colloquial region in which the volume opened. Painting
in these later days of Browning's has ceased to yield high, or even
serious poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be
compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of
_Holy-Cross Day_, while it wholly lacks the great lift of Hebraic
sublimity at the close. The _Epilogue_ returns to the combative
apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply
to the cavils of the discontented. They cannot have the strong and the
sweet--body and bouquet--at once, he tells them in effect, and he
chooses to be strong, to give the good grape and leave the cowslips
growing in the meadow. The argument was but another sally of the poet's
good-humoured chaff, and would not have stood the scrutiny of his
subtler mind. Doubtless he, like Ben Jonson, inclined to see signs of
the "strong" in the astringent and the gritty; but no one knew better,
when he chose, to wed his "strength" with "sweetness." The falling-off
of the present volume compared with _Men and Women_ or _Dramatis
Personae_ lay less in the lack of either quality than in his failure to
bring them together. Of the "stiff brew" there is plenty; but the
choicest aroma comes from that "wine of memories"--the fragrant
reminiscences--which the poet affected to despise. The epilogue ends,
incorrigibly, with a promise to "posset and cosset" the cavilling reader
henceforward with "nettle-broth," good for the sluggish blood and the
disordered stomach.

The following year brought a production wh