that moment, national. But Mr. Browning's Sordello is scarcely more Guelf than Ghibelline. He thinks both factions condemned alike by their narrowness. to Palma, 'Azzo, too, Supports a cause: what cause? Do Guelfs pursue He says And Mr. Browning continues, 'When The Guelfs were proved alike, men weighed with men And when a chance occurrence has suddenly flashed into his mind the thought that. 'Rome's the Cause! Rome of the Pandects, all the world's new laws-' Rome is to him neither papal nor imperial, neither Guelf nor Ghibelline, but simply the mother-city; the embodiment of a great historic, progressive, and constructive force, in the 'reintegration' of which may be 'typified the triumph of mankind.' This feeling for something not only higher than self, but larger and nobler than a party, is, the distinguishing moral note of Sordello's later life, the sign of his conversion. His final conflict is waged less against the temptations of a bad cause than against those of an exclusive, and also a triumphant one; and for this reason there is special interest in the digression which concludes the third book, though we must agree with Mr. Holland that it is rather bewildering to be sent flapping again on the wings of Mr. Browning's imagination, just when we fancy we are sitting down to rest in the beautiful restful city, in which he is supposed to be. One passage especially shows a yearning tenderness for the weaknesses and sorrows of humanity, which was almost required to explain the special quality of the poem the equal justice with which it treats the claims of universal brotherhood, and the exactions of a selfconscious personal existence. The story of Sordello is perhaps the one case on record of poetic egotism both depicted and judged by a poet, at what is usually the most poetic and also the most egotistic stage of a man's career. In 'The Ring and the Book' Mr. Holland has found a less difficult subject, and his patience has been rewarded by a more complete result. The breadth of handling which constitutes the great power and originality of this work presents itself to a hurried or desultory reader as mere tiresome lengthiness or repetition; and reducing it to a simple narrative was the best way of arousing the interest and the attention which are required for following it to the end. Mr. Holland was also fortunate in being able to tell the greater part of the story in the language of the two actors in it whose truthfulness is patent from the first; since the version thus supplied gives the strongest relief to both the poetic and the judicial aspect of the case. The purity of motive revealed by Pompilia's and Caponsacchi's defence covers all that is ambiguous in their act, and yet forbids any attempt to conceal it. We acknowledge the endless doubts and speculations to which it must have given rise, and understand how possible it was to condemn the murder, and still believe in the existence of some real provocation to it. And when we turn from the story to the book itself, and see how each speaker, single or collective, apparently exhausts all that can be said on the subject, and the next reopens it from the beginning, the very lengthiness of the work becomes an excitement, and its repetitions assume the force of novelty. There is something, however, in the Pope's soliloquy which could only be given in a fuller reproduction of it, and is at the same time needed for its appreciation; and that is, the mental conflict under which it is carried on. The main facts of his argument are sufficient to show that he is summing up the case against the Count and his accomplices; but they are not sufficient to make us feel that he is also summing it up against himself; that he is accumulating facts in order to stifle that shrinking from the necessary verdict, which is so natural in a very old man, weighed down by the responsibilities of his office, and already face to face with the Judgment to which his sinful fellow-creatures are to be consigned. They do not show that each new evidence of the blackness of the crime comes to him as a sense of relief, by proving its remission the more impossible; and that when he utters the sentence of death, it is with the feeling of having emerged from a supreme conflict which has exhausted his last strength. It is this which gives its pathetic power to what would otherwise be chiefly curious as a ninth or tenth re-statement of the one series of facts; and we may add that nothing in 'The Ring and the Book' displays the author's genius more triumphantly than the moral touch by which he has thus ennobled the weakness of old age. It is so true to nature, though so often belied by her. 'The Adventures of Balaustion' is useful in displaying the natural sequence which unites two works of Mr. Browning's, the one simple and popular, the other chiefly written for students; and those numerous readers of 'Balaustion's Adventure' who have been repelled by the title of 'Aristophanes' Apology,' or by the first dip into its contents, will be surprised to find how much the Rhodian woman and her reverence for Euripides have to do with it. Mr. Holland does not give a sketch of the 'Herakles' of this great dramatist as he did of his 'Alcestis;' and it is well on its own account that he did not, as it would have suffered more by the process; but this omission is also justified by the fact that Balaustion's first adventure is only a setting to the transcribed play, whereas the real interest of what Mr. Holland calls her second is independent of it. Herakles and its beauties form part of Balaustion's attack on Aristophanes; but Aristophanes is there to defend himself; and Mr. Browning has given him more flesh and blood, than to almost any man or woman of his creation. Balaustion is only intended to draw him out, by alternately appealing to his higher self, and trying to convict him of the lower. She also is human in her pride and pleasure in her husband, of whom we do not quite know whether he has loved her for Euripides' sake, or Euripides for hers; and it seems natural to see her transformed from the ardent girl, who poured forth the sorrows of Alcestis on the temple steps, to a dignified matron displaying the tokens of her poet's esteem and gratitude, among her household gods; still we feel sure that she represents the abstract rights of the case rather than any living exponent of them, and that Mr. Browning has made her a 'foreigner' that she may not seem less living still; since a young Athenian wife of Euripides' day would not have thought of him as an object of worship, and would scarcely have been competent to discuss him as such, if she had. Mr. Holland's semi-quotations give a good idea of the personal appearance of Aristophanes, and mark out some of the main points of his defence; but no mere sketch can convey a just impression of the mixed nature of the man, and of the opposite moods which chase each other in his mind (as Balaustion describes them) like the effects of cloud and sunshine upon the sea. It is the historic Aristophanes whom Mr. Browning has put before us, half drunk as he so frequently was; with his genius at once brilliant and obscene; his 'Tory' prejudices, and his unscrupulous pandering to the lowest popular delight; but he has also imagined him as shaken and excited by an unusual conflict of feeling. The news of Euripides' death, and the solemn tribute announced by Sophocles to his memory, have burst in on the orgy by which his theatrical triumph was being crowned; and the truth which is in wine, with the generosity of which no poet |