Polyxena is too constantly and uniformly herself; yet, no doubt, it is
right that opaline, shifting hues should not disturb our impression of
a character whose special virtue is steadfastness. The Queen of the
English Charles, who is eager to counsel, and always in her petulance
and folly to counsel ill, is slightly sketched; but she may be thanked
for one admirable speech--her first--when Strafford, worn and fevered in
the royal service, has just arrived from Ireland, and passing out from
his interview with the King is encountered by her:--

Is it over then?
Why he looks yellower than ever! Well
At least we shall not hear eternally
Of service--services: he's paid at least.

The Lady Carlisle of the same play--a creature in the main of Browning's
imagination--had the play been Elizabethan or Jacobean would have
followed her lord in a page's dress, have lived on half a smile a day,
and perhaps have succeeded in dying languishingly and happily upon his
sword; she is not quite unreal, nor yet quite real; something much
better than a stage property and not wholly a living woman; more of a
Beaumont and Fletcher personage of the boards--and as such
effective--than a Shakespearian piece of nature. The theatrical limbo to
which such almost but not quite embodied shadows ultimately troop, is
capacious.

In Browning's dramatic scene of 1853, _In a Balcony_, he created with
unqualified success "a very woman" in the enamoured Queen, whose heart
at fifty years beats only more wildly and desperately than a girl's.[30]
The young lovers, Constance and Norbert, are a highly meritorious pair,
who express their passion in excellent and eloquent periods; we have