'saving' of society. He is a practical man, professing a religion which he vaunts as eminently workable. He endeavours to prove that, in his special case, the 'means' taken were left to his private inclination, provided that he attained God's 'end.' He does not pretend to be one of earth's finest minds, his 'mission' consisted in utilising his peculiar gift of making the best of what is. Great reformers are for great crises, but society's conservators or 'saviours' are invaluable in other times. 'Prince HohenstielSchwangau' has balanced people's opposing tendencies for, say, twenty years, for he chiefly reverenced human life. Browning takes this opportunity of satirising the last stanzas of Childe Harold, and declares that the greatest nature is human nature. 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau' enlarges on the advantages of imperfection, here almost identifying the defence with Browning's direct philosophy. Perhaps the adaptability of his own ideas, even in a travestied form, to Louis Napoleon's apology drew Browning to the character he is delineating. Life is too short for theories, pursues 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.' Fourierism, Comtism, Kantism need a life a century long. A tinkering policy is best suited to life's average length. There was a time-when he was 'voice and nothing more'-when he, too, breathed lofty aspirations, such as the deliverance of Italy and a democratic internal policy. He was censured for abandoning these, but it was his conviction that feeding the hungry is the essence of govern

ment that made him subordinate every thing else. Here Browning touches on Louis Napoleon's best trait, his apparently genuine care for the poor. 'Prince Hohenstiel - Schwangau' acknowledges that he only ministered to the multitudinous bodies; he let the individual souls alone, except so far as to keep the peace between them. At the conclusion of this first part of the defence, Louis Napoleon pauses, perceiving how entirely he has made his account redound to his own credit. Ostensibly to balance this, really to defend himself anew, this time obliquely, he proposes giving a fictitious autobiography, according to the Thiers-Hugo school of history. This shall represent him as embracing the fine aims and doing the grand things which he is censured for not having embraced and done. It shall also disarm the critics of his actual life by intimating the equal obloquy that would be heaped upon this imaginary 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau' for being true to an impracticable ideal. 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau' actually acted, on the other hand, according to 'Sagacity,' and was condemned in the spirit of his idealised self. Part the second. Louis Napoleon describes his accession as it might have been, and how, had he spared the Coup d'Etat, he would have been blamed for doing so. He imagines what would have been the criticism passed upon him had he established free Rome by the force, not of the sword, but of public opinion. He describes how he (in his might-have-been character) boldly

forbade France ('Hohenstiel-Schwangau') its truculent joy in fighting, and kept it quiet, not by pretence of preparation for war, and so forth, but by refusing the iniquity of causeless bloodshed. In a fine passage (p. 197), Browning lauds the 'magnetic race' of France. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau' pleads his acceptance of righteous warfare, and gives a favourable sketch of his disinterestedness in the Italian undertaking. He hints that France would not have supported him without the cession of Savoy and Nice. He indulges in a final imaginative flight of patriotism in the reasons he might have alleged for refusing to have his child declared his successor. At this point, the reverie is dispersed. The 'peroration' contains what are perhaps the sincerest words yet spoken, in Louis Napoleon's expression of dissatisfaction both with his life and with its dubious justification.

Fifine at the Fair, 1872 (Vol. XI.), amid its congeries of fancies and opinions, has two prominent themes, the value of falseness or transitoriness, and the ideal meaning of marriage. These themes respectively reach the height of their expression in section cxxiv. and sections xliii., xliv. The tone of intimacy which the poem possesses makes it delightful reading to those who love Browning's mind almost more than his art. Here, and in Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, the poet seems to take his readers into his confidence, seems to say to them: Be my friends. As in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and other

works, an apparently capricious and remote choice of subject brings Browning round to those truths which he loves to dwell on and to illustrate in a hundred ways. The difficulty of Fifine at the Fair lies in the blurring of outline between its imaginary speaker, 'Don Juan's,' words of sophistry and Browning's words of truth. Browning does not defend unlimited experiment in love, though that is the application forced by Don Juan out of the principle that souls reach truth through falsity, and the knowledge of the permanent through the fleeting. When the monologue touches on principles, we have Browning and truth, when it applies those principles to the circumstances of its supposed speaker, we have perversion. The poem is primarily dramatic, but over and above its artistically complete characterisation and story, it gives Browning's explanation-a profound and acquiescent one-of life's law of change and incompleteness. Fifine contains perhaps a greater wealth of variegated imagery than any other work of Browning's, while its rare and fascinating versification, its sparkling sea-side air, and its passages of impassioned imagination atone for its excessive involution.

The Prologue, with its brine and sunshine, is a fable of poetry as life's mimicry of immortality—

"Unable to fly, one swims!"

It also foreshows a husband and wife's separation by death, which we recognise, when we come to the

Epilogue, as binding together the three portions of the poem by their deepest idea, the lastingness of love. The extract from Molière, giving a wife's pungent suggestion to her inconstant husband of the line his defence should take, strikes the key-note of Fifine at the Fair, on its dramatic side. Browning's 'Don Juan' founds his plea for an extended experience with regard to women on the assumption that such experience is purely intellectual, and enhances, not deposes, the wife. He addresses his closely knit argument in defence of this position to Elvire, his wife (who is a little faded and past her prime), during an autumn evening's ramble at Pornic in Brittany. ‘Don Juan' is a man of extreme æsthetic impressibility, a warm admirer of opposed types of womanhood. His intellect is as subtilising as his senses are inflammable, and he uses its refinements to try and deceive his tearful, true wife and himself as to the direction of his interest in the saucy dancer, Fifine, who has just arrived at Pornic, with a caravan, for the Fair, and whom he sees for the first time. He imagines and formulates Elvire's objections to his dangerous marital theory, and combats them. Dramatically, the monologue is Don Juan's unconscious expression of the bohemian impulse, the occasional desire for chance and change which lurks in every breast. Starting from a sympathising vindication of the gipsy vagrants' cherished lawlessness, he soon reaches the real secret of his interest in the troupe, the allurement of the girl in tights and spangles,