im an outraged, helpless old man, craving with senile
greed a gift from his son--the pity of it revives an old weakness, an
old instinct of filial submission, in the heart of Charles. He has
tasked himself without sparing; he has gained the affections of his
subjects; he has conciliated a hostile Europe; is not this enough? Or
was it also in the bond that he should tread a miserable father into the
dust? The test again of Luigi, in the third part of _Pippa Passes_, is
that of one who sees all the oppression of his people, who is enamoured
of the antique ideal of liberty, and whose choice lies between a youth
of luxurious ease and the virtue of one heroic crime, to be followed by
the scaffold-steps, with youth cut short. To him that overcometh and
endureth unto the end will God give the morning-star:

The gift of the morning-star! Have I God's gift
Of the morning-star?

And Luigi will adventure forth--it may be in a kind of divine folly--as
a doomsman commissioned by God to free his Italy. The devotion of Luria
to Florence is partly of the imagination, and perhaps it is touched with
something of illusion. But the actual Florence, with her astute
politicians, her spies who spy upon spies, her incurable distrusts, her
sinister fears, her ingrained ingratitude, is clearly exposed to him
before the end. Shall he turn the army, which is as much his own as the
sword he wields, joined with the forces of Pisa, against the beautiful,
faithless city? Or will his passionate loyalty endure the test? Luria
withdraws from life, but not until he has made every provision for the
victory of Florence over her enemy; nor does he die a defeated man; his
moral greatness has subdued all envies and all distrusts; at the close
everyone is true to him:

The only fault's with time;
All men become good creatures: but so slow.[29]

Once again in Browning's earliest play, the test for the patriot Pym
lies in the choice between two loyalties--one to England and to
freedom, the other to his early friend and former comrade in politics.
His faith in Strafford dies hard; but it dies; he flings forward his
hopes for the grand traitor to England beyond the confines of this life,
and only the grieved unfaltering justiciary remains. Browning's Pym is a
figure neither historically true nor dramatically effective; he is
self-conscious and sentimental, a patriot armed in paste-board rhetoric.
But the writer, let us remember, was young; this