When Carlyle met Browning after the appearance of The Ring and the Book, he desired to be complimentary, but was hardly more felicitous than Browning himself had sometimes been when under a like necessity:  “It is a wonderful book,” declared Carlyle, “one of the most wonderful poems ever written.  I re-read it all through—­all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting."[100] A like remark might have been made respecting the book which, in its method and its range of all English books most resembles Browning’s poem, and which may indeed be said to take among prose works of fiction a similar place to that held among poetical creations by Browning’s tale of Guido and Pompilia.  Richardson’s Clarissa consists of eight volumes made out of an Old Bailey story, or what might have been such, which one short newspaper paragraph could have dismissed to a happy or sorrowful oblivion.  But then we should never have known two of the most impressive figures invented by the imagination of man, Clarissa and her wronger; and had we not heard their story from all the participators and told with Richardson’s characteristic interest in the microscopy of the human heart, it could never have possessed our minds with that full sense of its reality which is the experience of every reader.  Out of the infinitesimally little emerges what is great; out of the transitory moments rise the forms that endure.  It is of little profit to discuss the question whether Richardson could have effected his purpose in four volumes instead of eight, or whether Browning ought to have contented himself with ten thousand lines of verse instead of twenty thousand.  No one probably has said of either work that it is too short, and many have uttered the sentence of the critical Polonius—­“This is too long.”  But neither Clarissa nor The Ring and the Book is one of the Hundred Merry Tales; the purpose of each writer is triumphantly effected; and while we wish that the same effect could have been produced by means less elaborate, it is not safe to assert confidently that this was possible.

It has often been said that the story is told ten times over by almost as many speakers; it would be more correct to say that the story is not told even once.  Nine different speakers tell nine different stories, stories of varying incidents about different persons—­for the Pompilia of Guido and the Pompilia of Caponsacchi are as remote, each from other, as a marsh-fire from a star, and so with the rest.  In the end we are left to invent the story for ourselves—­not indeed without sufficient guidance towards the truth of things, since the successive speeches are a discipline in distinguishing the several values of human testimony.  We become familiar with idols of the cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the market-place, and shall recognise them if we meet them again.  Gossipry on this side is checked and controlled by gossipry on that;