Though played for only five nights, _Strafford_ had won a success which might well have dazzled a young and untried aspirant, and which was sufficiently impressive to shrewd men of business like Messrs Longman to induce them to undertake its publication free of cost. It appeared in April, with an interesting preface, subsequently withdrawn, from which a significant sentence has already been quoted. The composition of _Strafford_ had not only "freshened a jaded mind" but permanently quickened his zest for the drama of political crises. New projects for historical dramas chased and jostled one another through his busy brain, which seems to have always worked most prosperously in a highly charged atmosphere. I am going "to begin ... thinking a Tragedy," he wrote characteristically to Miss Haworth--"(an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticisms on _Strafford_), and I want to have _another_ tragedy in prospect; I write best so provided."[16] [Footnote 16: Orr, _Life_, p. 103.] The "Historical Tragedies" here foreshadowed, _King Victor and King Charles_ and _The Return of the Druses_, were eventually published as the Second and Fourth of the _Bells and Pomegranates_, in 1842-43. How little Browning cared for history except as a quarry for psychical problems, how little concern he had at bottom with the changing drama of national life, is clear from the directions in which he now sought his good. In _Strafford_ as in _Paracelsus_, and even in _Sordello_, the subject had made some appeal to the interest in great epochs and famous men. Henceforth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curious blend of the historical specialist who explores the recondite byways of history, and the romantic poet who abandons actuality altogether. He seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,--Sardinia, Juliers, Lebanon; but actual historic research gradually yields ground to a free invention which, however, always simulates historic truth. _King Victor and King Charles_ contains far less poetry than _Paracelsus_, but it was the fruit of historic studies no less severe. There was material for genuine tragedy in the story. The old king, who after fifty years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of his son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes, but, finding that Charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches angrily at his surrendered crown,--this King Victor has something in him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV. But history provided more sober issues, and Browning's temperament habitually inclined him to stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle eddyings of thought and feeling. Charles is no Regan, hardly even an Albany, no weakling either, but a man of sensitive conscience, who shifts and gyrates responsively to the complex play of motive which Browning brings to bear upon him. Reluctantly he orders Victor's arrest,