In the study of a monologue, if we will find exactly where we are, many difficult questions will be settled at once; and the interpreter by pausing and using care can make clear, through the emphatic interpretation of the first sentences, a vast number of points which would otherwise be of great difficulty. Mr. Macfadyen has well said, "Much of the apparent obscurity of Browning is due to his habit of climbing up a precipice of thought, and then kicking away the ladder by which he climbed." The opening of Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi" requires a conception of night and a sudden surprise-- "I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave! You need not clap your torches to my face. Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!" These words cannot be given excitedly or dramatically without realizing the role the police are playing, their rough handling of Lippo, and their discovery that they have seized a monk at an unseemly hour of the night and not in a respectable part of the city. We must identify ourselves with Lippo and feel the torches of the police in the face, and the hand "fiddling" on his throat. This whole situation must be as definitely conceived as if a part of a play. The reference to "Cosimo of the Medici" should be spoken very suggestively, and we should feel with Lippo the consequent relief that resulted, and the dismay also of the police on finding they have in hand an artist friend of the greatest man in Florence. "Boh! you were best!" means that the hands of the policeman have been released from his throat. All this dramatic action, however, must be secondary to the conception of the character of the monk-painter. Almost immediately, in the very midst of the excitement, possibly with reference to the very fellow who had grasped his throat, the artist, with the true spirit of a painter, exclaims, "He's Judas to a tittle, that man is! Just such a face!" and as the chief of the squad of police sends his watchmen away, the painter's heart once more awakes and discovers a picture, and he says, almost to himself: "I'd like his face-- His, elbowing on his comrade in the door With the pike and lantern,--for the slave that holds John Baptist's head a-dangle by the hair With one hand ('Look you, now,' as who should say) And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped! It's not your chance to have a bit of chalk, A wood-coal or the like? or you should see! Yes, I'm the painter, since you style me so. What, brother Lippo's doings, up and down, You know them, and they take you? like enough! I saw the proper twinkle in your eye-- 'Tell you, I liked your looks at very first. Let's sit and set things straight now, hip to haunch." Thus the monologue is introduced, and with a captain of a night-watch in Florence as listener, this great painter, who tried to paint things truly, pours out his critical reflections,--