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April, with an interesting preface, subsequently withdrawn, from which a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,