than is actually the case.  In truth, though the “corporal rind” of the narrative bulks upon our view, the poet remains essentially the psychologist.  The narrative interest is not evenly distributed over the whole as it is in the works of such a writer as Chaucer, who loves narrative for its own sake.  There is ordinarily a crisis, a culmination, a decisive and eventful invasion or outbreak of spiritual passion to which we are led up by all that precedes it.  If the poem should be humorous, it works up to some humorous point, or surprise.  The narrative is in fact a picture that hangs from a nail, and the nail here is some vivid moment of spiritual experience, or else some jest which also has its crisis.  A question sometimes arises as to whether the central motive is sufficient to bear the elaborate apparatus; for the parts of the poem do not always justify themselves except by reference to their centre, in the case, for example, of Doctor——­, the thesis is that a bad wife is stronger than death; the jest culminates at the point where the Devil upon sight of his formidable spouse flies from the bed’s-head of one who is about to die, and thus allows his victim to escape the imminent death.  The question, “Will the jest sustain a poem of such length?” is a fair one, and a good-natured reader will stretch a point and say that he has not after all been so ill amused, which he might also say of an Ingoldsby Legend; but even a good-natured reader will hardly return to Doctor ——­ with pleasure.  Chaucer with as thin a jest could have made an admirable poem, for the interest would have been distributed by his lightness of touch, by his descriptive power, by slyness, by geniality, by a changeful ripple of enjoyment over the entire piece.  With Browning, when we have arrived at the apex of the jest, we are fatigued by the climb, and too much out of breath to be capable of laughter.  In like manner few persons except the Browning enthusiast, who is not responsible for his fervour, will assert that either the jest or the frankly cynical moral of Pietro of Abano compensates for the jolting in a springless waggon over a rough road and a long.  We make the acquaintance of a magician who with knowledge uninspired by love has kicks and cuffs for his reward, and the acquaintance of an astute Greek, who, at least in his dream of life, imposed upon him by the art of magic, exploits the talents of his friend Pietro, and gains the prize of his astuteness, having learnt to rule men by the potent spell of “cleverness uncurbed by conscience.”  The cynicism is only inverted morality, and implies that the writer is the reverse of cynical; but it lacks the attractive sub-acid flavour of a delicate cynicism, which insinuates its prophylactic virus into our veins, and the humour of the poem, ascending from stage to stage until we reach Pietro’s final failure, is cumbrous and mechanical.