theatre—the theatre of old Arezzo: share with me the tattered vision and inhale the musty air!—I am well in range of Pompilia, the tragically exquisite, in her box, with her husband not there for the hour but posted elsewhere; I look at her in fact over Caponsacchi’s shoulder and that of his brother-canon Conti, while this light character, a vivid recruit to our company, manages to toss into her lap, and as coming in guise of overture from his smitten friend, “a papertwist of comfits.” There is a particular famous occasion at the theatre in a work of more or less contemporary fiction—at a petty provincial theatre which isn’t even, as you might think, the place where Pendennis had his first glimpse of Miss Fotheringay. The evening at the Rouen playhouse of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” has a relief not elsewhere equalled—it is the most _done_ visit to the play in all literature—but, though “doing” is now so woefully out of favour, my idea would be to give it here a precious _pendant_; which connection, silly Canon Conti, the old fripperies and levities, the whole queer picture and show of manners, is handed over to us, expressly, as inapt for poetic illustration. What is equally apt for poetic or for the other, indeed, is the thing for which we feel “The Ring and the Book” preponderantly done—it is at least what comes out clearest, comes out as straightest and strongest and finest, from Browning’s genius—the exhibition of the great constringent relation between man and woman at once at its maximum and as the relation most worth while in life for either party; an exhibition forming quite the main substance of our author’s message. He has dealt, in his immense variety and vivacity, with other relations, but on this he has thrown his most living weight; it remains the thing of which his own rich experience most convincingly spoke to him. He has testified to it as charged to the brim with the burden of the senses, and has testified to it as almost too clarified, too liberated and sublimated, for traceable application or fair record; he has figured it as never too much either of the flesh or of the spirit for him, so long as the possibility of both of these is in each, but always and ever as the thing absolutely most worth while. It is in the highest and rarest degree clarified and disengaged for Caponsacchi and Pompilia; but what their history most concludes to is how ineffably it was, whatever happened, worth while. Worth while most then for them or for us is the question? Well, let us say worth while assuredly for us, in this noble exercise of our imagination. Which accordingly shows us what we, for all our prose basis, would have found, to repeat my term once more, prepared for us. There isn’t a detail of their panting flight to Rome over the autumn Apennines—the long hours when they melt together only _not_ to meet—that doesn’t positively plead for our perfect prose transcript. And if it be said that the mere massacre at the final end is a lapse to