The secondary personages in Richardson’s “Clarissa” grow somewhat faint in our memories; but the figures of his heroine and of Lovelace remain not only uneffaceable but undimmed by time.  Four of the dramatis personae of Browning’s poem in like manner possess an enduring life, which shows no decline or abatement after the effect of the monologues by the other speakers has been produced and the speakers themselves almost forgotten.  Count Guide Franceschini is not a miracle of evil rendered credible, like Shakespeare’s Iago, nor a strange enormity of tyrannous hate and lust like the Count Cenci of Shelley.  He has no spirit of diabolic revelry in crime; no feeling for its delicate artistry; he is under no spell of fascination derived from its horror.  He is clumsy in his fraud and coarse in his violence.  Sin may have its strangeness in beauty; but Guido does not gleam with the romance of sin.  If Browning once or twice gives his fantasy play, it is in describing the black cave of a palace at Arezzo into which the white Pompilia is borne, the cave and its denizens—­the “gaunt gray nightmare” of a mother, mopping and mowing in the dusk, the brothers, “two obscure goblin creatures, fox-faced this, cat-clawed the other,” with Guido himself as the main monster.  Yet the Count, short of stature, “hook-nosed and yellow in a bush of beard” is not a monster but a man; possessed of intellectual ability and a certain grace of bearing when occasion requires; although wrenched and enfeebled by the torture of the rack he holds his ground, has even a little irony to spare, and makes a skilful defence.  Browning does not need a lithe, beautiful, mysterious human panther, and is content with a plain, prosaic, serviceable villain, who would have been disdained by the genius of the dramatist Webster as wanting in romance.  But like some of Webster’s saturnine, fantastic assistants or tools in crime, Guido has failed in everything, is no longer young, chews upon the bitter root of failure, and is half-poisoned by its acrid juices.  He is godless in an age of godless living; cynical in a cynical generation; and ever and anon he betrays the licentious imagination of an age of license.  He plays a poor part in the cruel farce of life, and snarls against the world, while clinging desperately to the world and to life.  A disinterested loyalty to the powers of evil might display a certain gallantry of its own, but, though Guido loathes goodness, his devotion to evil has no inverted chivalry in it—­there is always a valid reason, a sordid motive for his rage.  And in truth he has grounds of complaint, which a wave of generous passion would have swept away, but which, following upon the ill successes of his life, might well make a bad man mad.  His wife, palmed off upon the representative of an ancient and noble house, is the child of a nameless father and a common harlot of Rome; she is repelled by his person; and her cold submission to what she has been instructed