_Mary_. O God! I have been too slack, too slack; There are Hot Gospellers even among our guards— Nobles we dared not touch. We have but burnt The heretic priest, workmen, and women and children. Wet, famine, ague, fever, storm, wreck, wrath,— We have so play’d the coward; but by God’s grace, We’ll follow Philip’s leading, and set up The Holy Office here—garner the wheat, And burn the tares with unquenchable fire!” The conclusion, in the acting edition, printed in the Biography, appears to be an improvement on that in the text as originally published. Unhappy as the drama essentially is, the welcome which Mr Browning gave both to the published work and to the acted play—“a complete success”: “conception, execution, the whole and the parts, I see nowhere the shadow of a fault”—offers “relief” in actual human nature. “He is the greatest-brained poet in England,” Tennyson said, on a later occasion. “Violets fade, he has given me a crown of gold.” Before writing _Harold_ (1876) the poet “studied many recent plays,” and re-read Æschylus and Sophocles. For history he went to the Bayeux tapestry, the _Roman de Rou_, Lord Lytton, and Freeman. Students of a recent controversy will observe that, following Freeman, he retains the famous palisade, so grievously battered by the axe-strokes of Mr Horace Round. _Harold_ is a piece more compressed, and much more in accordance with the traditions of the drama, than _Queen Mary_. The topic is tragic indeed: the sorrow being that of a great man, a great king, the bulwark of a people that fell with his fall. Moreover, as the topic is treated, the play is rich in the irony usually associated with the name of Sophocles. Victory comes before a fall. Harold, like Antigone, is torn between two duties—his oath and the claims of his country. His ruin comes from what Aristotle would call his _ἁμαρτία_, his fault in swearing the oath to William. The hero himself; recking little, after a superstitious moment, of the concealed relics over which he swore, deems his offence to lie in swearing a vow which he never meant to keep. The persuasions which urge him to this course are admirably presented: England, Edith, his brother’s freedom, were at stake. Casuistry, or even law, would have absolved him easily; an oath taken under duresse is of no avail. But Harold’s “honour rooted in dishonour stood,” and he cannot so readily absolve himself. Bruce and the bishops who stood by Bruce had no such scruples: they perjured themselves often, on the most sacred relics, especially the bishops. But Harold rises above the mediæval and magical conception of the oath, and goes to his doom conscious of a stain on his honour, of which only a deeper stain, that of falseness to his country, could make him clean. This is a truly tragic stroke of destiny. The hero’s character is admirably noble, patient, and simple. The Confessor