The poem begins with the view that one half of Rome took of the events.  At the very commencement we touch one of the secondary interests of the book, the incidental characters.  Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and, in a lesser degree, Violante and Pietro, are the chief characters, and the main interest contracts around them.  But, through all they say and do, as a motley crowd through a street, a great number of minor characters move to and fro; and Browning, whose eye sees every face, and through the face into the soul, draws them one by one, some more fully than others in perhaps a hundred lines, some only in ten.  Most of them are types of a class, a profession or a business, yet there is always a touch or two which isolates each of them so that they do not only represent a class but a personal character.  He hated, like Morris, the withering of the individual, nor did he believe, nor any man who knows and feels mankind, that by that the world grew more and more.  The poem is full of such individualities.  It were well, as one example, to read the whole account of the people who come to see the murdered bodies laid out in the Church of Lorenzo.  The old, curious, doddering gossip of the Roman street is not less alive than the Cardinal, and the clever pushing Curato; and around them are heard the buzz of talk, the movement of the crowd.  The church, the square are humming with humanity.

He does the same clever work at the deathbed of Pompilia.  She lies in the House of the dying, and certain folk are allowed to see her.  Each one is made alive by this creative pencil; and all are different, one from the other—­the Augustinian monk, old mother Baldi chattering like a jay who thought that to touch Pompilia’s bedclothes would cure her palsy, Cavalier Carlo who fees the porter to paint her face just because she was murdered and famous, the folk who argue on theology over her wounded body.  Elsewhere we possess the life-history of Pietro and Violante, Pompilia’s reputed parents; several drawings of the retired tradesmen class, with their gossips and friends, in the street of a poor quarter in Rome; then, the Governor and Archbishop of Arezzo, the friar who is kindly but fears the world and all the busy-bodies of this provincial town.  Arezzo, its characters and indwellers, stand in clear light.  The most vivid of these sketches is Dominus Hyacinthus, the lawyer who defends Guido.  I do not know anything better done, and more amusingly, than this man and his household—­a paternal creature, full of his boys and their studies, making us, in his garrulous pleasure, at home with them and his fat wife.  Browning was so fond of this sketch that he drew him and his boys over again in the epilogue.