eves the too oppressive jollity of Don
Giacinto, and the flowery rhetoric of Bottini; while in the fourth,
the deep wisdom, justice, and righteous mind of the Pope, reconcile
us to endure the sulphurous whiff from the pit in the confession of
Guido, now desperate, naked, and satanic. From what at first was sheer
murk, there comes out a long procession of human figures, infinitely
various in form and thought, in character and act; a group of men and
women, eager, passionate, indifferent; tender and ravenous, mean and
noble, humorous and profound, jovial with prosperity or half-dumb with
misery, skirting the central tragedy, or plunged deep into the thick
of it, passers-by who put themselves off with a glance at the surface
of a thing, and another or two who dive to the heart of it. And
they all come out with a certain Shakespearian fulness, vividness,
directness. Above all, they are every one of them men and women,
with free play of human life in limb and feature, as in an antique
sculpture. So much of modern art, in poetry as in painting, runs to
mere drapery. "I grant," said Lessing, "that there is also a beauty in
drapery, but can it be compared with that of the human form? And shall
he who can attain to the greater, rest content with the less? I much
fear that the most perfect master in drapery shows by that very talent
wherein his weakness lies." This was spoken of plastic art, but it has
a yet deeper meaning in poetic criticism. There too, the master is he
who presents the natural shape, the curves, the thews of men, and does
not labour and seek praise for faithful reproduction of the mere moral
drapery of the hour, this or another; who gives you Hercules at strife
with Antaeus, Laocoon writhing in the coils of the divine serpents,
the wrestle with circumstance or passion, with outward destiny or
inner character, in the free outlines of nature and reality. The
capacity which it possesses for this presentation, at once so varied
and so direct, is one reason why the dramatic form ranks as the
highest expression and measure of the creative power of the poet; and
the extraordinary grasp with which Mr. Browning has availed himself of
this double capacity is one reason why we should reckon _The Ring and
the Book_ as one of his masterpieces.

We may say this, and still not be blind to the faults of the poem.
Many persons agree that they find it too long, and if they find it so,
then for them it is too long. Others, who ca