Once again: her plea for Guido. That she should forgive him was essential, but the pardon should have been blind pardon. No reason can confirm it; and we should but have loved her more for seeking none. To put in her mouth the plea that Guido had been deceived in his hope of enrichment by marriage, and that his anger, thus to some extent justified, was aggravated by her "blindness," by her not knowing "whither he sought to drive" her with his charges of light conduct, "So unaware, I only made things worse" . . . --this is bad through and through; this is the excess of ingenuity which misled Browning so frequently. There is no loveliness of pardon here; but something that we cannot suffer for its gross humility. The aim of Guido, in these charges, was filthiest evil: it revolts to hear the victim, now fully aware--for the plea is based on her awareness--blame herself for not "apprehending his drift" (could _she_ have used that phrase?), and thus, in the madness of magnanimity, seem to lose all sense of good and evil. It is over-subtle; it is not true; it has no beauty of any kind. But Browning could not "leave things alone"; he had to analyse, to subtilise--and this, which comes so well when it is analytic and subtle minds that address us, makes the defect of his work whenever an innocent and ignorant girl is made to speak in her own person. I shall not multiply instances; my aim is not destructive. But I think the unmeasured praise of Browning by some of his admirers has worked against, not for, him. It irritates to read of the "perfection" of this speech--which has beauties so many and so great that the faults may be confessed, and leave it still among the lovely things of our literature. I turn now gladly to those beauties. Chief is the pride and love of the new-made mother--never more exquisitely shown, and here the more poignantly shown because she is on her death-bed, and has not seen her little son again since the "great fortnight." She thinks how well it was that he had been taken from her before that awful night at the Villa: "He was too young to smile and save himself;" --for she does not dream, not then remembering the "money" which was at the heart of all her woe, that _he_ would have been spared for that money's sake. . . . But she had not seen him again, and now will never see him. And when he grows up and comes to be her age, he will ask what his mother was like, and people will say, "Like girls of seventeen," and he will think of some girl he knows who titters and blushes when he looks at her. . . . That is not the way for a mother! "Therefore I wish someone will please to say I looked already old, though I was young;" --and she begs to be told that she looks "nearer twenty." Her name too is not a common one--that may help to keep apart "A little the thing I am from what girls are." But how hard for him to find out anything about her: