savour wherewith shall it be salted?  This it is which condemns to a swift, and what the poem represents as a just, abolishment from earth the mother who in Ivan Ivanovitch has given her children to the wolves, and has thereby proved the complete nullity of her womanhood.  For her there is no possible redemption; she must cease to cumber the ground.  Ivan acts merely as the instinctive doomsman of Nature or of God, and the old village Pope, who, as the veil of life grows thin, is feeling after the law above human law, justifies the wielder of the axe, which has been no instrument of vengeance but simply an exponent of the wholesome vitality of earth.  The objection that carpenters and joiners, who assume the Heraklean task of purging the earth of monsters, must be prepared to undergo a period of confinement at the pleasure of the Czar in a Criminal Lunatic Asylum is highly sensible, and wholly inappropriate, belonging, as it does, to a plane of thought and feeling other than that in which the poem moves.  But perhaps it is not a defect of feeling to fail in admiration of that admired final tableau in which the formidable carpenter is discovered building a toy Kremlin for his five children.  We can take for granted that the excellent homicide, having done so simple a bit of the day’s work as that of decapitating a fellow-creature, proceeds tranquilly to other innocent pleasures and duties; we do not require the ostentatious theatrical group, with limelight effects on the Kremlin and the honey-coloured beard, displayed for our benefit just before the curtain is rung down.[142]

[Illustration:  SPECIMEN OF BROWNING’S HANDWRITING.

From a letter to D.S.  CURTIS, Esq.]

Martin Relph is a story of life-long remorse, self-condemnation and self-denunciation; there is something approaching the supernatural, and yet terribly real, in the figure of the strange old man with a beard as white as snow, standing, on a bright May day, in monumental grief, and exposing his ulcerated heart to the spectators who form for him a kind of posterity.  One instant’s failure in the probation of life, one momentary syncope of his better nature long years ago, has condemned his whole after-existence to become a climbing of the purgatorial mount, with an agony of pain annually renewed at the season when the earth rejoices.  Only a high-strung delicate spirit is capable of such a perennial passion of penitence. Ned Bratts may be described as a companion, but a contrasted piece.  It is a story of sudden conversion and of penitence taking an immediate and highly effective form.  The humour of the poem, which is excellent of its kind, resembles more the humour of Rowlandson than that of Hogarth.  The Bedford Court House on the sweltering Midsummer Day, the Puritan recusants, reeking of piety and the cow-house conventicle, the Judges at high jinks upon the bench—­to whom, all in a muck-sweat and ablaze with the fervour of conversion, enter Black Ned, the stout publican,