The loyalty of men, their supreme devotion and their test may, as with women, spring from the passion of love; but other tests than this are often proposed to them.  With King Charles of Sardinia it is duty to his people that summons him, from those modest and tranquil ways of life of which he dreamed, to the cares and toils of the crown.  He has strength to accept without faltering the burden that is laid upon him.  And if he falters at the last, and would resign to his father, who reclaims it, the crown which God alone should have removed, shall we assert confidently that Browning’s dramatic instinct has erred?  The pity of it—­that his great father, daring in battle, profound in policy, should stand before him an outraged, helpless old man, craving with senile greed a gift from his son—­the pity of it revives an old weakness, an old instinct of filial submission, in the heart of Charles.  He has tasked himself without sparing; he has gained the affections of his subjects; he has conciliated a hostile Europe; is not this enough?  Or was it also in the bond that he should tread a miserable father into the dust?  The test again of Luigi, in the third part of Pippa Passes, is that of one who sees all the oppression of his people, who is enamoured of the antique ideal of liberty, and whose choice lies between a youth of luxurious ease and the virtue of one heroic crime, to be followed by the scaffold-steps, with youth cut short.  To him that overcometh and endureth unto the end will God give the morning-star: 

    The gift of the morning-star!  Have I God’s gift
    Of the morning-star?

And Luigi will adventure forth—­it may be in a kind of divine folly—­as a doomsman commissioned by God to free his Italy.  The devotion of Luria to Florence is partly of the imagination, and perhaps it is touched with something of illusion.  But the actual Florence, with her astute politicians, her spies who spy upon spies, her incurable distrusts, her sinister fears, her ingrained ingratitude, is clearly exposed to him before the end.  Shall he turn the army, which is as much his own as the sword he wields, joined with the forces of Pisa, against the beautiful, faithless city?  Or will his passionate loyalty endure the test?  Luria withdraws from life, but not until he has made every provision for the victory of Florence over her enemy; nor does he die a defeated man; his moral greatness has subdued all envies and all distrusts; at the close everyone is true to him: 

     The only fault’s with time;
    All men become good creatures:  but so slow.[29]

Once again in Browning’s earliest play, the test for the patriot Pym lies in the choice between two loyalties—­one to England and to freedom, the other to his early friend and former comrade in politics.  His faith in Strafford dies hard; but it dies; he flings forward his hopes for the grand traitor to England beyond the confines of this life, and only the grieved unfaltering justiciary remains.