very dull
who in reading the poem does not perceive that the very spirit of it
points to the thousand hazards which even this fragment of justice had
to run in saving itself, and bringing about such partially righteous
consummation as destiny permits. True opinion fares yet more
perilously. _Half-Rome_, the _Other Half-Rome_, the _Tertium Quid_,
which is perhaps most masterly and finished of the three, show us
how ill truth sifts itself, to how many it never comes at all, how
blurred, confused, next door to false, it is figured even to those who
seize it by the hem of the garment. We may, perhaps, yawn over the
intermingled Latin and law of Arcangeli, in spite of the humour of
parts of it, as well as over the vapid floweriness of his rival; but
for all that, we are touched keenly by the irony of the methods by
which the two professional truth-sifters darken counsel with words,
and make skilful sport of life and fact. The whole poem is a parable
of the feeble and half-hopeless struggle which truth has to make
against the ways of the world. That in this particular case truth and
justice did win some pale sort of victory does not weaken the force
of the lesson. The victory was such and so won as to stir in us awful
thoughts of fatal risks and certain defeats, of falsehood a thousand
times clasped for truth, of fact a thousand times banished for
fancy:--

"Because Pompilia's purity prevails,
Conclude you, all truth triumphs in the end?
So might those old inhabitants of the ark,
Witnessing haply their dove's safe return,
Pronounce there was no danger all the while
O' the deluge, to the creature's counterparts,
Aught that beat wing i' the world, was white or soft,
And that the lark, the thrush, the culver too,
Might equally have traversed air, found earth,
And brought back olive-branch In unharmed bill.
Methinks I hear the Patriarch's warning voice--
'Though this one breast, by miracle, return,
No wave rolls by, in all the waste, but bears
Within it some dead dove-like thing as dear,
Beauty made blank and harmlessness destroyed!'"

(iv. 218).

Or, to take another simile from the same magnificent passage, in which
the fine dignity of the verse fitly matches the deep truth of the
preacher's monitions:--

"Romans! An elder race possessed your land
Long ago, and a false faith lingered still,
As shades do, though the morning-star be out.
Doubtless, some pagan of the twilight day