Fifine. He gives brilliant sketches of four typical women, Helen, Cleopatra, Elvire, and Fifine, basing the claim of the last on her negation of claim. That frankness, which she has, even in fraud, Don Juan later declares to be the inmost charm of the actor class to which she belongs. He pacifies Elvire by comparing her to his Rafael, Fifine to a picture-book of Doré's. He loves the peerless possession none the less that he amuses himself with the picture-book, which, at an alarm of fire, he would throw away, rushing to save his treasure. Having worked himself back into an enthusiasm for 'the wondrous wife,' he defends the philosophical truth of the assertion that beauty is in the eyes of the seer, by affirming that it is so because love is the archetypal Art, supplementing and repairing the short-comings and defects of its subject, and discerning its secret beauty. (Browning here branches into the Platonic theory of souls seeking their complementary souls.) This fructification of the lover's soul from the soul of the beloved produces a new reality for the lover, who is the sculptor, not of marble or clay, but of life. The lover gets an absolute gain, of beauty from deformity, of completeness from what was previously only suggestion. In the fact of this gain, or rather creation, Browning finds the sign-manual of immortality written on love. He looks forward to a future when the soul of the loved one shall be consciously dowered with the experience gained in the individual life of the other soul. Human beings' efforts and progress may

to themselves seem self-kindled and self-centred, but are really incited by, and move towards, their lodestars, the complementary souls. Elvire's objection that this fine talk about minds and souls covers an unconfessed interest in a certain fleshly sheath is replied to by her husband thus: 'People have to live in earthly falseness (which Fifine typifies) just as a swimmer buoys himself in water, which, were he submerged, would drown him. Truth is as vital to the soul as air to the swimmer, but just as flying is not adapted to man as he now is, so truth undiluted is impossible in the present state. The impulse to reach truth and air is necessary to life.' So far the parallel is honest, but when Don Juan proceeds to prove all experience, moral or otherwise, equally valuable to the soul's progress, he is in the sophistical region, and Browning stands aside. The sea simile concludes by making fun of the meaning and grammar of a passage in Childe Harold, and ridiculing Byron and his imitators for their exaltation of inanimate nature. 'Elvire may doubtless ask why women, not men, are to be her husband's educators.' Don Juan's reply, with its double pair of similitudes, contains the finest poetry in the work, notably in lxxiii., and in the comparison of women to the self-forgetting, generous dolphins in the legend of Arion. Elvire perhaps wonders why she, avowedly her husband's Best, cannot suffice him.' 'Because,' he ingeniously replies, 'the Fifines, like crank boats, teach 'seamanship' better than safe and steady ships.

Life is a trial of strength, whence truth is wrested by practice with the false.' Ten lines from the third of the First Book of the Odes of Horace are translated here (lxxxii.) Don Juan attributes the drift of all he has hitherto said to a dream he had in the morning, after playing Schumann, while the music itself affords him another instance of the permanence within change which is the law of art and life. He dreamed he was gazing down upon a Carnival of masks, some representing animals, some the hideousness of ignoble Age, or Youth without promise, and some, the overweening propensity which obliterates every other trait in its possessor. Then he descended among the masks to find their aggressive brutality soften down on closer inspection. He found something to sympathise with, even to admire, in those 'safeguards' of the outward men which, at a distance, had seemed repulsive. So far the 'dream' might well be Browning's own, but Don Juan adds the inevitable touch of sophistry by emphasising anew the value of every experience, inasmuch as self-knowledge is only learned through acquaintance with different beings. (Of course he is indirectly excusing his interest in Fifine.) In his dream he next saw the houses, temples, and domes dissolve, signifying to him the evanescent character of creeds, philosophies, and arts. After various transmutations, the buildings died into a great, gaunt Druid monument, such as exists at Pornic. To Browning, the monument symbolises the objective Truth and Permanence which humanity

is meant to reach, through those very 'shows of sense,’ which, each promising to be true and proving false, are the education which the soul-itself true and permanent-must pass through in order to arrive finally at its proper resting-place. The allusion to the Prometheus of Eschylus, in cxxv., whimsically compares Fifine to the Daughters of Ocean, who solaced the chained Titan. In exxix., Don Juan overturns his sophistries by enunciating that "inconstancy means raw," that "love ends where love began,” and that

"The wanderer brings home no profit from his quest
Beyond the sad surmise that keeping house were best
Could life begin anew.”

A less dramatic writer might have ended his work here. Not so Browning. cxxxi. prepares us for an anticlimax, which comes in the revelation of a private understanding between the husband and Fifine. There is something half pathetic in the contrast between Don Juan's last bit of philosophy and his practice. If nothing else had done so, this appropriate conclusion would prove the fallacy of his argument so far as he applied it to the justification of disloyalty. The event and its sequel are sketchily indicated in the Epilogue, which represents the husband deprived of the wife he was unworthy of, but rejoined to her in death by the very persistence of the love which, in life, he had exalted in word and outraged in deed.

Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or, Turf and Towers, 1873 (Vol. XII.), is as many-sided as its maker. According as we regard it, it is a sensational novel in verse, a study of one of the anachronisms of our century's religious transition, a realistic revelation of the strange workings of certain hearts, or a delightfully roundabout book. In any case, it is a powerful, wholly unconventional instance of Browning's dramatic genius, which here invests with thought and feeling a painful story, that was tried, under the name of the Mellerio-Debacker case, in 1872, in the Court of Caen. The early part and the close of Red Cotton Night-Cap Country owe their chatty, familiar tone to the fact that the well-known writer, then Miss Annie Thackeray, is the story's special recipient. We learn from the poem that at 'Saint Rambert (really Saint Aubin) on the Norman coast, where they both were in the summer of 1872, a pleasant strife arose between the poet and his friend as to whether the district was completely fitted by the appellation which Miss Thackeray playfully gave it, of White Cotton Night-Cap Country.' Browning characteristically insisted that some 'Red,' sin's tragic hue, lurked even in that land of drowsy-head. For some time, he plays at disappointing his listener's anticipation of any specific scarlet, thereby awakening a keener expectancy of it. When it comes, we find that the grounds for his obstinate assertion that the 'tragic bit of Red' could be extracted from the apparently humdrum somnolency of that particular corner of

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