distinction had he been born in an age of great dramatic poetry. If it
is weak in construction so--though in a less degree--are Webster's
_Duchess of Malfi_, and Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_.

In _King Victor and King Charles_ Browning adopted, and no doubt
deliberately, a plain, unfigured and uncoloured style, as suiting both
the characters and the historical subject. The political background of
this play and that of _Strafford_ hardly entitles either drama to be
named political. Browning was a student of history, but it was
individuals and not society that interested him. The affairs of England
and the affairs of Sardinia serve to throw out the figures of the chief
_dramatis persons_; those affairs are not considered for their own sake.
Certain social conditions are studied as they enter into and help to
form an individual. The Bishop who orders his tomb at St Praxed's is in
part a product of the Italian Renaissance, but the causes are seen only
in their effects upon the character of a representative person. If the
plain, substantial style of _King Victor and King Charles_ is proper to
a play with such a hero as Charles and such a heroine as Polyxena, the
coloured style, rich in imagery, is no less right in _The Return of the
Druses_, where religious and chivalric enthusiasm are blended with the
enthusiasm of the passion of love. But already Browning was ceasing to
bear in mind the conditions of the stage. Certain pages where Djabal and
Khalil, Djabal and Anael, Anael and Loys are the speakers, might be
described as dialogues conducted by means of "asides," and even the
imagination of a reader resents a construction of scenes which requires
these duets of soliloquies, these long sequences of the
audible-inaudible. With the "very tragical mirth" of the second part of
Chiappino's story of moral and political disaster, the spectators and
the stage have wholly disappeared from Browning's theatre; the imaginary
dialogue is highly dramatic, in one sense of the word, and is admirable