Browning there was an element, showing itself from time to time, of strange perversity. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 103: Was this a "baffled visit," as described by Mr Henry James in his "Life of Story" (ii. 197), when the hostess was absent, and the guests housed in an inn?] [Footnote 104: Letter quoted by Mrs Orr, p. 288.] [Footnote 105: The attitude is reproduced in a photograph from which a woodcut is given in Mme. Blanc's article "A French Friend of Browning."] [Footnote 106: "Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning," by Annie Ritchie, pp. 291, 292.] [Footnote 107: "A Bibliography of the Writings of Robert Browning," by T.J. Wise, pp. 157, 158.] [Footnote 108: _Aristophanes' Apology_ is connected with these poems by its character as a casuistical self-defence of the chief speaker.] [Footnote 109: North's "Plutarch," 1579, p. 599.] [Footnote 110: "Les Deux Masques," ii. 281.] [Footnote 111: A comment of Paul de Saint-Victor on the silence of the recovered Alkestis deserves to be quoted: "Hercule apprend à Admète qu'il lui est interdit d'entendre sa voix avant qu'elle soit purifiée de sa consécration aux Divinités infernales. J'aime mieux voir dans cette réserve un scrupule religieux du poète laissant à la morte sa dignité d'Ombre. Alceste a été nitiée aux profonds mystères de la mort; elle a vu l'invisible, elle a entendu l'ineffable; toute parole sortie de ses lèvres serait une divulgation sacrilège. Ce silence mystérieux la spiritualise et la rattache par un dernier lien au monde éternel."] Chapter XIV Problem and Narrative Poems