“King Victor and King Charles” is a drama containing four characters moderately well conceived and discriminated, but evincing dramatic genius not much above Bulwer’s, though profounder in sentiment, and richer in imagination. The most dramatic passage is where Polyxena seizes her husband’s hand, when he is on the point of yielding to a weak amiability of nature, and conjures him to sacrifice her happiness and his to duty. It is the passage commencing— “King Charles! pause here upon this strip of time, Allotted you out of eternity!” “Colombe’s Birth Day” is a sweet and beautiful dramatic poem, abounding in intellectual wealth. The characters of Colombe and Valence are vigorously drawn. The scene between them in the fourth act, where he confesses his love, is grand and exhilarating as an exhibition of character and passion. But the idea of the play, that of representing the triumph of love over wealth and rank in a woman fully susceptible of the charms of the latter, is the animating life of the piece. We hardly know, out of Fletcher and Shakspeare, a play where fidelity to a sentiment is represented with such ethereal grace. In “Luria” and “The Return of the Druses,” an intimate acquaintance is shown with the best and worst parts of human nature, and the development of the characters indicates that the author’s dramatic skill grows with exercise. Luria is a noble character, original in conception, and finely developed from “within outwards.” “A Soul’s Tragedy” has many marked excellences of thought, and diction, and exhibits one of the most hateful qualities in human nature, with a blended dramatic coolness and individual abhorrence, singularly felicitous. The “Dramatic Lyrics” are very striking, and are full of matter. “Count Gismond,” “Porphyria’s Lover,” “The Confessional,” “The Lost Leader,” and “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” we should select as, on the whole, the best. The latter, written for little William Macready, exhibits the peculiar vein of humor in which Browning excels, and of which we have indications all over his works. The commencement we will venture to extract: “Rats! They fought the dogs, and killed the cats, And bit the babies in the cradles, And ate the cheese out of the vats, And licked the soup from the cook’s own ladles. Split open the kegs of the salted sprats, Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats, And even spoiled the women’s chats, By drowning their speaking And shrieking and squeaking, In fifty different sharps and flats.”