And if Pompilia often recalls his wife, the situation of the Elder Lady may fairly remind us of that of Marion Erle in _Aurora Leigh_. But many complexities in the working out mark Browning's design. The betrayed girl, scornfully refusing her betrayer's tardy offer of marriage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of a clergyman, in the drudgery of a benighted parish. The chance meeting of the two, four years after, in the inn parlour, their bitter confessions, through the veil of mutual hatred, that life has been ruined for both,--he, with his scandalous successes growing at last notorious, she, the soul which once "sprang at love," now sealed deliberately against beauty, and spent in preaching monstrous doctrines which neither they nor their savage parishioners believe nor observe,--all this is imagined very powerfully and on lines which would hardly have occurred to any one else. The _Pacchiarotto_ volume forms a kind of epilogue to the work of the previous half-dozen years. Since _The Ring and the Book_ he had become a famous personage; his successive poems had been everywhere reviewed at length; a large public was genuinely interested in him, while a yet larger complained of his "obscurity," but did not venture to ignore him, and gossiped eagerly about his private life. He himself, mingling freely, an ever-welcome guest, in the choicest London society, had the air of having accepted the world as cordially as it on the whole accepted him. Yet barriers remained. Poems like the _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_, the _Inn Album_, and _Fifine_ had alienated many whom _The Ring and the Book_ had won captive, and embarrassed the defence of some of Browning's staunchest devotees. Nobody knew better than the popular diner-out, Robert Browning, how few of the men and women who listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his inner mind; and he did little to assist their insight. The most affable and accessible of men up to a certain point, he still held himself, in the deeper matters of his art, serenely and securely aloof. But it was a good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found quite natural expression in a volley of genial chaff at the critics who thought themselves competent to teach him his business. This is the main, at least the most dominant, note of _Pacchiarotto_. It is like an aftermath of _Aristophanes' Apology_. But the English poet scarcely deigns to defend his art. No beautiful and brilliant woman is there to put him on his mettle and call out his chivalry. The mass of his critics are roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial sally, as "sweeps" officiously concerned at his excess of "smoke." _Pacchiarotto_ is a whimsical tale of a poor painter who came to grief in a Quixotic effort to "reform" his fellows. Rhyme was never more brilliantly abused than in this _tour de force_, in which the clang of the machinery comes near to killing the music. More seriously, in the finely turned stanzas _At the