'King Victor and King Charles' and 'The Return of the Druses' are both admitted by competent judges to have good qualifications for the stage; and Mr. Browning would have preferred seeing one of these acted to witnessing the revival of 'Strafford' or 'A Blot in the 'Scutcheon', from neither of which the best amateur performance could remove the stigma of past, real or reputed, failure; and when once a friend belonging to the Browning Society told him she had been seriously occupied with the possibility of producing the Eastern play, he assented to the idea with a simplicity that was almost touching, 'It _was_ written for the stage,' he said, 'and has only one scene.' He knew, however, that the single scene was far from obviating all the difficulties of the case, and that the Society, with its limited means, did the best it could. I seldom hear any allusion to a passage in 'King Victor and King Charles' which I think more than rivals the famous utterance of Valence, revealing as it does the same grasp of non-conventional truth, while its occasion lends itself to a far deeper recognition of the mystery, the frequent hopeless dilemma of our moral life. It is that in which Polixena, the wife of Charles, entreats him for _duty's_ sake to retain the crown, though he will earn, by so doing, neither the credit of a virtuous deed nor the sure, persistent consciousness of having performed one. Four poems of the 'Dramatic Lyrics' had appeared, as I have said, in the 'Monthly Repository'. Six of those included in the 'Dramatic Lyrics and Romances' were first published in 'Hood's Magazine' from June 1844 to April 1845, a month before Hood's death. These poems were, 'The Laboratory', 'Claret and Tokay', 'Garden Fancies', 'The Boy and the Angel', 'The Tomb at St. Praxed's', and 'The Flight of the Duchess'. Mr. Hood's health had given way under stress of work, and Mr. Browning with other friends thus came forward to help him. The fact deserves remembering in connection with his subsequent unbroken rule never to write for magazines. He might always have made exceptions for friendly or philanthropic objects; the appearance of 'Herve Riel' in the 'Cornhill Magazine', 1870, indeed proves that it was so. But the offer of a blank cheque would not have tempted him, for his own sake, to this concession, as he would have deemed it, of his integrity of literary purpose. 'In a Gondola' grew out of a single verse extemporized for a picture by Maclise, in what circumstances we shall hear in the poet's own words. The first proof of 'Artemis Prologuizes' had the following note: 'I had better say perhaps that the above is nearly all retained of a tragedy I composed, much against my endeavour, while in bed with a fever two years ago--it went farther into the story of Hippolytus and Aricia; but when I got well, putting only thus much down at once, I soon forgot the remainder.'*