Balaustion is herself the first to recognise the divinity shrouded in this half satyr-like form: in some of the finest verses of the poem she compares him to the sea-god, whom as a child she had once seen peer "large-looming from his wave, * * * * * A sea-worn face, sad as mortality, Divine with yearning after fellowship," while below the surface all was "tail splash, frisk of fin." And when Balaustion has recited her poet's masterpiece of tragic pathos, Aristophanes lays aside the satirist a moment and attests his affinity to the divine poets by the noble song of Thamyris. The "transcript from Euripides" itself is quite secondary in interest to this vivid and powerful dramatic framework. Far from being a vital element in the action, like the recital of the _Alkestis_, the reading of the _Hercules Furens_ is an almost gratuitous diversion in the midst of the talk; and the tameness of a literal (often awkwardly literal) translation is rarely broken by those inrushes of alien genius which are the glory of Browning's _Alkestis_. Yet the very self-restraint sprang probably from Browning's deep sensibility to the pathos of the story. "Large tears," as Mrs Orr has told us, fell from his eyes, and emotion choked his voice, when he first read it aloud to her. The _Inn Album_ is, like _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_, a versified novel, melodramatic in circumstances, frankly familiar in scenery and atmosphere. Once more, as in the _Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, and in _James Lee's Wife_, Browning turned for his "incidents in the development of souls" to the passion and sin-frayed lives of his own countrymen. But no halo of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the sordid modernity of the facts; the "James Lee" of this tragedy appears in person and is drawn with remorseless insistence on every mean detail which announces the "rag-and-feather hero-sham." Everything except his wit and eloquence is sham and shabby in this Club-and-Country-house villain, who violates more signally than any figure in poetic literature the canon that the contriver of the tragic harms must not be totally despicable. A thief, as Schiller said, can qualify for a tragic hero only by adding to his theft the more heroic crime of murder; but Browning's Elder Man compromises even the professional perfidies of a Don Juan with shady dealings at cards and the like which Don Juan himself would have scouted. In _Fifine_ the Don Juan of tradition was lifted up into and haloed about with poetical splendours not his own; here he is depressed into an equally alien sorriness of prose. But the decisive and commanding figure, for Browning and for his readers, is of course his victim and Nemesis, the Elder Lady. She is as unlike Pompilia as he is unlike Guido; but we see not less clearly how the upleaping of the soul of womanhood in the child, under the stress of foul and cruel wrongs, has once more asserted its power over him.