Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district “White Cotton Night-Cap Country.”  It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable attraction.  The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing that Browning in his heart loved better than Paradise Lost.  Some time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district.  It is worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar.  From The Ring and the Book to Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country a great many of his works might be called magnificent detective stories.  The story is somewhat ugly, and its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make ugliness uglier.  And in this poem there is little or nothing of the revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in The Ring and the Book.  It almost looks at first sight as if Browning had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human story can be sordid.  But this view of the poem is, of course, a mistake.  It was written in something which, for want of a more exact word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but the bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes more than they deserved.  In this poem these principles of weakness and evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the more sensual side of the French temperament.  We must never forget what a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end.  This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit.  It says in effect, “You call this a country of sleep, I call it a country of death.  You call it ‘White Cotton Night-Cap Country’; I call it ’Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.’”

Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published Fifine at the Fair, which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism.  Perplexing it may be to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card.  But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote.  Cynicism denotes that condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and arid; that