as his mind is, his judgment is clear, his sentence determined.  Only, before he speaks, he will weigh all the characters, and face any doubts that may shoot into his conscience.  He passes Guido and the rest before his spiritual tribunal, judging not from the legal point of view, but from that which his Master would take at the Judgment Day.  How have they lived; what have they made of life?  When circumstances invaded them with temptation, how did they meet temptation?  Did they declare by what they did that they were on God’s side or the devil’s?  And on these lines he delivers his sentence on Pompilia, Caponsacchi, Guido, Pietro, Violante, and the rest.  He feels he speaks as the Vicegerent of God.

This solemn, silent, lonely, unworldly judgment of the whole case, done in God’s presence, is, after the noisy, crowded, worldly judgment of it by Rome, after the rude humours of the law, and the terrible clashing of human passions, most impressive; and it rises into the majesty of old age in the summing up of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and Guido.  I wish Browning had left it there.  But he makes a sudden doubt invade the Pope with a chill.  Has he judged rightly in thinking that divine truth is with him?  Is there any divine truth on which he may infallibly repose?

And then for many pages we are borne away into a theological discussion, which I take leave to say is wearisome; and which, after all, lands the Pope exactly at the point from which he set out—­a conclusion at which, as we could have told him beforehand, he would be certain to arrive.  We might have been spared this.  It is an instance of Browning’s pleasure in intellectual discourse which had, as I have said, such sad results on his imaginative work.  However, at the end, the Pope resumes his interest in human life.  He determines; and quickly—­“Let the murderer die to-morrow.”

Then comes the dreadful passion of Guido in the condemned cell, of which I have spoken.  And then, one would think the poem would have closed.  But no, the epilogue succeeds, in which, after all the tragedy, humour reigns supreme.  It brings us into touch with all that happened in this case after the execution of Guido; the letters written by the spectators, the lawyer’s view of the deed, the gossip of Rome upon the interesting occasion.  No piece of humour in Browning’s poetry, and no portrait-sketching, is better than the letter written by a Venetian gentleman in Rome giving an account of the execution.  It is high comedy when we are told that the Austrian Ambassador, who had pleaded for Guido’s life, was so vexed by the sharp “no” of the Pope (even when he had told the Pope that he had probably dined at the same table with Guido), that he very nearly refused to come to the execution, and would scarcely vouchsafe it more than a glance when he did come—­as if this conduct of his were a slight which the Pope would feel acutely.  Nor does Browning’s invention stop with this inimitable letter.  He adds two other letters which he found among the papers; and these give to the characters of the two lawyers, new turns, new images of their steady professional ambition not to find truth, but to gain the world.