way in which a primitive nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them."[8] There is perhaps more to be said for the poem than the suggestions involved in any or all of these comments. A protracted investigation as to how far Browning's Caliban is an immediate development of the Caliban of _The Tempest_ would be beside the main object of these Lectures; but for an understanding of the value to be reasonably attached to the soliloquy it is essential to estimate as fairly as may be possible the character, intellectual and moral, of the soliloquist, since Caliban's conception of his Creator must necessarily be influenced by the limitations of his own powers, whether physical or mental. For here, as elsewhere in the dramatic poems, Browning has completely identified himself with his soliloquist. How far, therefore, we are justified in claiming for Caliban's theology the title of "a fragment of Browning's own Christian apologetics" can only be decided by a careful consideration and a comparison with work not avowedly dramatic in character. Reading again those scenes of _The Tempest_, in which Caliban plays a part, we become more than ever convinced that the Caliban of the poem is but the Caliban of the play seen through the medium of Browning's phantasy. This, however, is not equivalent to the admission of simplicity as a characteristic of this strange being, merely is it a recognition that the potentialities existent in Shakespeare's Caliban are nearer to becoming actualities in the Caliban of Browning. Caliban's may, indeed, be the nature of a primitive being, but the nature is not, therefore, simple; to the peculiarly complex character of his personality is due the main interest of the poem--curiously undeveloped in some departments of his nature, the moral sense appears to be almost non-existent, he is, nevertheless, an imaginative creature with a distinct poetic and artistic vein in his composition. Whilst Prospero's estimate of him seems to have been a fairly accurate one: The most lying slave Whom stripes may move, not kindness; as Mr. Stopford Brooke has pointed out "his very cursing is imaginative"[9]-- As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed With raven's feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both. (Act I, Sc. ii.) And it is Caliban who appreciates the music of Ariel which to Trinculo and Stephano, products of civilization so-called, is a thing fearful as the work of the devil. Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. (Act III, Sc. ii.) Such is the re-assurance offered by the "man-monster" of Shakespeare. But the Caliban of Browning is yet in his primitive condition, untouched by contact with the outer world as represented even by these dregs of a civilization which, whilst checking the expression of the brutish instinct, increases by repression the force of passions struggling for an outlet to which conventionality bars the way.