why quarrel with the parables accepted by other minds than our own?  The answer is twofold.  First Browning was not a sceptic with respect to the truths attained through love, and he held that mankind had already attained through love truths that condemned the religion of self-torture and terrified propitiations, which led Leonce Miranda to reduce his right hand and his left to carbonised stumps and dragged him kneeling along the country roads to manifest his devotion to the image of the Virgin.  Secondly he held that our education through intellectual illusions is a progressive education, and that to seek to live in an obsolete illusion is treason against humanity.  Therefore his exhortation is justified by his logic: 

     Quick conclude
    Removal, time effects so tardily,
    Of what is plain obstruction; rubbish cleared,
    Let partial-ruin stand while ruin may,
    And serve world’s use, since use is manifold.

The tower which once served as a belfry may possibly be still of use to some Father Secchi to “tick Venus off in transit”; only never bring bell again to the partial-ruin,

    To damage him aloft, brain us below,
    When new vibrations bury both in brick.

For which sane word, if not for all the pages of his poem, we may feel gratefully towards the writer.  It is the word of Browning the moralist.  The study of the double-minded hero belongs to Browning the psychologist.  The admirable portrait of Clara, the successful adventuress, harlot and favoured daughter of the Church, is the chief gift received through this poem from Browning the artist.  She is a very admirable specimen of her kind—­the mamestra brassicae species of caterpillar, and having with beautiful aplomb outmanoeuvred and flouted the rapacious cousinry, Clara is seen at the last, under the protection of Holy Church, still quietly devouring her Miranda leaf—­such is the irony of nature, and the merit of a perfect digestive apparatus.

The second narrative poem of this period, The Inn Album (1875), is in truth a short series of dramatic scenes, placed in a narrative frame-work.  It is as concentrated as Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is diffuse; and the unities of time and place assist the tragic concentration.  A recast of The Inn Album might indeed have appeared as a drama on the Elizabethan stage side by side with such a brief masterpiece, piteous and terrible, as “A Yorkshire Tragedy”; it moves with a like appalling rapidity towards the climax and the catastrophe.  The incident of the attempted barter of a discarded mistress to clear off the score of a gambling debt is derived from the scandalous chronicle of English nineteenth century society.[116] Browning’s tale of crime was styled on its appearance by a distinguished critic of Elizabethan drama the story of a “penny dreadful.”  He was right; but he should have added that some of the most impressive and elevated pieces of our dramatic