Mertoun, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it; who, further, at a later date, affirmed that he would rather have written this play than any work of modern times:  nor with less reluctance, that I find myself at variance with Mr. Skelton, who speaks of the drama as “one of the most perfectly conceived and perfectly executed tragedies in the language.”  In the instance of Luria, that second Othello, suicide has all the impressiveness of a plenary act of absolution:  the death of Anael seems as inevitable as the flash of lightning after the concussion of thunder-clouds.  But Thorold’s suicide is mere weakness, scarce a perverted courage; and Mildred’s broken heart was an ill not beyond the healing of a morally robust physician.  “Colombe’s Birthday” has a certain remoteness of interest, really due to the reader’s more or less acute perception of the radical divergence, for all Valence’s greatness of mind and spirit, between the fair young Duchess and her chosen lover:  a circumstance which must surely stand in the way of its popularity.  Though “A Soul’s Tragedy” has the saving quality of humour, it is of too grim a kind to be provocative of laughter.

In each of these plays[14] the lover of Browning will recall passage after passage of superbly dramatic effect.  But supreme in his remembrance will be the wonderful scene in “The Return of the Druses,” where the Prefect, drawing a breath of relief, is almost simultaneously assassinated; and that where Anael, with every nerve at tension in her fierce religious resolve, with a poignant, life-surrendering cry, hails Djabal as Hakeem—­as Divine—­and therewith falls dead at his feet.  Nor will he forget that where, in the “Blot on the ’Scutcheon,” Mildred, with a dry sob in her throat, stammeringly utters—­

                “I—­I—­was so young! 
      Besides I loved him, Thorold—­and I had
      No mother; God forgot me:  so I fell——­”

or that where, “at end of the disastrous day,” Luria takes the phial of poison from his breast, muttering—­

     “Strange!  This is all I brought from my own land
      To help me.”

[Footnote 14:  “Strafford,” 1837; “King Victor and King Charles,” 1842; “The Return of the Druses,” and “A Blot on the ’Scutcheon,” 1843; “Colombe’s Birthday,” 1844; “Luria,” and “A Soul’s Tragedy,” 1845.]

Before passing on from these eight plays to Browning’s most imperishable because most nearly immaculate dramatic poem, “Pippa Passes,” and to “Sordello,” that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry, I should like—­out of an embarrassing quantity of alluring details—­to remind the reader of two secondary matters of interest pertinent to the present theme.  One is that the song in “A Blot on the ’Scutcheon,” “There’s a woman like a dew-drop,” written several years before the author’s meeting with Elizabeth Barrett, is so closely in the style of “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” and other ballads by the sweet singer who afterwards became a partner in the loveliest marriage of which we have record in literary history, that, even were there nothing to substantiate the fact, it were fair to infer that Mertoun’s song to Mildred was the electric touch which compelled to its metric shape one of Mrs. Browning’s best-known poems.