In 1871 he produced Balaustion’s Adventure, a work exhibiting not only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough assimilation of the vast literature of a remote civilisation. Balaustion’s Adventure, which is, of course, the mere framework for an English version of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one of Browning’s finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic admiration.  Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming the poetry of others; and Balaustion’s Adventure is a monument of this fiery self-forgetfulness.  It is penetrated with the passionate desire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for the time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the songs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido.  Browning never put himself into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only an excellent translation.  In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in the tangled ethics of Sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most feather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism.  This revived excitement in Greek matters; “his passionate love of the Greek language” continued in him thenceforward till his death.  He published more than one poem on the drama of Hellas. Aristophanes’ Apology came out in 1875, and The Agamemnon of AEschylus, another paraphrase, in 1877.  All three poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the writer has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers’ ends.  He is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their frivolity and their slang; he knows not only Athenian wisdom, but Athenian folly; not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity.  In fact, a page of Aristophanes’ Apology is like a page of Aristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman’s treatise, with its load of jokes.

In 1871 also appeared Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau:  Saviour of Society, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning’s apologetic monologues.  The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon III., whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it.  The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe twice—­once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he made it think he was a statesman.  It might be added that Europe was never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity.  Amid the general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning’s to give