Come, dearest!—­look, the little fairy, now
    That cannot reach my shoulder!  Dearest, come!

And so proceeds the tragedy, with much that ought to be dear to the average actor, which yet is somehow not always even theatrically happy.  The pathos of the closing scene where Strafford is discovered in The Tower, sitting with his children, is theatrical pathos of the most correct kind, and each little speech of little William and little Anne is uttered as much for the audience as for their father, implying in every word “See, how we, poor innocents, heighten the pity of it.”  The hastily written A Blot in the ’Scutcheon is, perhaps, of Browning’s dramas the best fitted for theatrical representation.  Yet it is incurably weak in the motives which determine the action; and certain passages are almost ludicrously undramatic.  If Romeo before he flung up his ladder of ropes had paused, like Mertoun, to salute his mistress with a tenor morceau from the opera, it is to be feared that runaways’ and other eyes would not have winked, and that old Capulet would have come upon the scene in his night-gown, prepared to hasten the catastrophe with a long sword.  Yet A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, with its breadth of outline, its striking situations, and its mastery of the elementary passions—­love and wrath and pride and pity—­gives us assurance that Browning might have taken a place of considerable distinction had he been born in an age of great dramatic poetry.  If it is weak in construction so—­though in a less degree—­are Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

In King Victor and King Charles Browning adopted, and no doubt deliberately, a plain, unfigured and uncoloured style, as suiting both the characters and the historical subject.  The political background of this play and that of Strafford hardly entitles either drama to be named political.  Browning was a student of history, but it was individuals and not society that interested him.  The affairs of England and the affairs of Sardinia serve to throw out the figures of the chief dramatis persons; those affairs are not considered for their own sake.  Certain social conditions are studied as they enter into and help to form an individual.  The Bishop who orders his tomb at St Praxed’s is in part a product of the Italian Renaissance, but the causes are seen only in their effects upon the character of a representative person.  If the plain, substantial style of King Victor and King Charles is proper to a play with such a hero as Charles and such a heroine as Polyxena, the coloured style, rich in imagery, is no less right in The Return of the Druses, where religious and chivalric enthusiasm are blended with the enthusiasm of the passion of love.  But already Browning was ceasing to bear in mind the conditions of the stage.  Certain pages where Djabal and Khalil, Djabal and Anael, Anael and Loys are the speakers,