:

have had no part. This is Mr. Browning's constant ideal of love the power not to forget and to forgive a past wrong, but so to obliterate its very existence that nothing remains to be forgiven.

The meeting between Jules and Phene is followed by the appearance of Bluphocks, and his thoughtless ruffianism forms such a startling contrast to the dreamy, delicate sentiment of the foregoing scene, that Mr. Browning himself has commented upon it. A foot-note to the name of Bluphocks gives these words from the gospel of St. Matthew, which might well serve as a supplementary title to the drama:

'He maketh the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.'

Mr. Holland has prefaced his story of 'The Return of the Druses,' with an historical sketch of the Druse sect, and so answered a question which must often have been repeated, 'How much of the tragedy is true?' This question does not present itself to those who both know Mr. Browning as a poet and are in sympathy with him; since everything which he writes is founded on fact, and nothing not distinctly put forward as historical is literally true to it. His subject is almost always the 'might have been,' the things which a given person might have said or done, the motives by which a given act might have been inspired; and in this welding together of fact and fiction, the actual and the possible, the first object is that the artist himself should scarcely see the joins. Still there will always be minds to which it is necessary to discover the line between what is virtually true and what is really so. This may be desired from a sympathetic

motive as well as a critical one; and in any case we must be grateful to Mr. Holland, for having placed a curious episode in religious and political history within such easy reach. The play itself is better adapted to his purpose than 'Luria,' or 'The Blot in the 'Scutcheon,' for there is more 'story' in it; though the swaying movement of its plot and characters becomes rather fatiguing when conveyed to us in this necessarily abrupt form. We miss the dramatic atmosphere, which the introduction can only partially supply. Taken as a whole, 'The Return of the Druses' is one of Mr. Browning's most characteristic works; and nothing which he has written satisfies more completely the tragic test of impressing us with pity and with fear. Djabal plays with fire in stirring the depths of Anael's patriotic and human passion; but he does not know that he is doing so: for her nature is single, while his is not, and she burns at white heat under a stress of emotion which drives up many-coloured flames from his own. There could be no stronger instance of natural retribution, than her commission of the crime from which he all but recoils; and the fatal, though natural cross-purpose, in which each of them acts up to an imagined standard in the other's mind, gives the truest pathos to their destruction. We are not sure that Anael is quite so natural as Djabal. Her kind of intensity is not usually accompanied by so much self-comprehension. At all events, we are scarcely prepared for it in an inexperienced girl of the period, and of the nation, to which she is referred. We should rather expect that her love for the man and her belief in his divinity, would confuse themselves in her mind, and she would regard

the one, if she thought about it at all, as the necessary expression of the other. But a more unquestioning devotion might equally have prompted her to the critical act; and the situation in which it issues is so deeply human, that the complete historic fitness of its antecedent circumstance is of slight account. Anael is haunted by the idea that she feels for her prophet only as she might feel for a man. It brings remorse and pain; and she slays the tyrant with her own hand, in the belief that this final sacrifice of her womanhood will both hasten her lover's 'exaltation,' and give her a better right to share it. But Djabal is not exalted. For one awful moment she is confronted by her mistake. From eager expectation, from sickening dread, she flashes into an indignant knowledge of the truth; and then, in as sudden a revulsion, she takes him back to her heart, exulting in her right to love him as the mere erring mortal she has always felt him to be. This 'way of love' has much in common with that which Mr. Browning has described in the second act of 'Pippa Passes.' Both are forms of the protecting tenderness which seeks those who need, rather than those who can entirely repay it. We find it most often in his men, and we know that it is not peculiar to either sex ; but it was just that poetry should glorify it in women, because fiction has done so much to discredit it in them. The good girl of the novel never loves a man whom she cannot all round esteem, or does not think that she can; or if she does, she is ashamed of the fact, and poetic justice overtakes her in whatever form of punishment the case supplies. Yet the most angelic, as well as the most earthly forms of attachment

must be those which look down. We cannot tell whether the dying cry in which Anael attests her lover's divinity is wrung from her by a returning belief, or by an overmastering impulse to save him in spite of himself; it belongs to the mystery of a last moment of consciousness, and as such neither truth nor poetry would gain by any definite explanation of it.

Djabal is an historical type, and one very congenial to Mr. Browning's fancy. We find him again in the coarser form and more prosaic setting of 'Sludge, the Medium;' and 'Sludge' may be said to represent the philosophy of the character, as Djabal represents its poetry. His confession is a searching analysis of the manner in which deception and self-deception may play into each other's hands. The time is fast waning when a schemer and a mystic can be found in the same man; and the transformation of Djabal into Sludge, marks the descent of self-deceiving impostorship from the historical stage to the domestic. Yet this form of deception retains a certain claim upon our sympathy, for it is one of those mental facts, in which the history of the Race still repeats itself in the history of a great many individuals. The 'Race' has outgrown the possibility of a Djabal, and only repeats him in the meaner and already expiring form of Sludge; but there are few imaginative children who do not, at some time or other, play at Djabal's enchantments, and work themselves into a momentary belief in their own performance of them. The old instinct of the supernatural persists side by side with the reason which condemns it, and in the same mind. Djabal's dying speech is deeply touching, and Mr.

There was,

Holland's prose gives the substance of it. perhaps, no sufficient motive for quoting it in full; yet we regret that he could not do so, because the verse has a slackening and intermittent movement, which admirably conveys both the solemnity of the feeling and the growing physical effort with which we imagine it to have been expressed. In his closing words :

'On to the Mountain! At the Mountain, Druses!'

we see the little tide of Druse national existence flowing over his wasted life and that of the woman whom he loved; we hear the ring of its recovered liberty and of its new hopes-and we are confronted by a moral, trite enough as far as expression goes, but which bears a fresh significance for every human life: 'Fair means are better than foul.' The Druse cause was not advanced for one moment by the fraud and violence which were exerted in its behalf; its 'problem' was naturally resolving itself when fraud and violence were conspiring to cut it through. The course of events did not frustrate these crimes, but it rendered them useless; it rolled onwards to the legitimate goal, casting crime and criminals aside. The modified 'foul means' which we are tempted to use, have nothing in common with Djabal's offence; but often, like his, they force the hand of circumstance when it is working for us. And we do not die as he does; but we live to endure the deepest of all regret, because the most hopeless: that which utters itself in the inward cry, 'Had we but waited!'

In judging the remainder of Mr. Holland's storiesas, indeed, with regard to all of them-it must be remem