The Duke is showing, with the weak pride of the mere virtuoso, a portrait of his last Duchess, to some one who has been sent to negotiate another marriage. We see that he is having an entertainment or reception of some kind in his palace, and that he has withdrawn from the company with the envoy to the picture-gallery on an upper floor. He has pulled aside the curtain from before the portrait, and in remarking on the expression which the artist, Fra Pandolf, has given to the face, he is made to reveal a fiendish jealousy on his part, occasioned by the sweetness and joyousness of his late Duchess, who, he thought, should show interest in nothing but his own fossilized self. “She had,” he says, “a heart-- how shall I say?--too soon made glad, too easily impressed; she liked whate’er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere. Sir, ‘twas all one! My favour at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the West, the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her, the white mule she rode with round the terrace--all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush, at least. She thanked men,--good! but thanked somehow--I know not how--as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody’s gift.” Her fresh interest in things, and the sweet smile she had for all, due to a generous soul-life, proved fatal to the lovely Duchess: “Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene’er I passed her; but who passed without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.” He succeeded, and he seems to be proud of it, in shutting off all her life-currents, pure, and fresh, and sparkling, as they were, and we must suppose that she than sank slowly and uncomplainingly away. What a deep pathos there is in “then all smiles stopped together”! * -- * “I gave commands” certainly must not be understood to mean commands for her death, as it is understood by the writer of the articles in ‘The Saint Paul’s Magazine’ for December, 1870, and January, 1871. {See Preface: Note to the Third Edition.} -- The contemptible meanness and selfishness of jealousy were never exhibited with greater power, than they are exhibited in this short monologue--a power largely due to the artistic treatment. The jealousy of Leontes, in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, of Shakespeare, is nobility itself, in comparison with the Duke’s. How distinctly, while indirectly, the sweet Duchess is, with a few masterly touches, placed before us! The poet shows his artistic skill especially in his indirect, reflected portraitures. This short composition, comprising as it does but fifty-six lines, is, of itself, sufficient to prove the poet a consummate artist. Tennyson’s TECHNIQUE is quite perfect, almost “faultily faultless”, indeed; but in no one of his compositions has he shown an equal degree of art-power, in the highest sense of the word. {‘My Last Duchess’}