The square little Italian volume, in its yellow parchment and with its heavy type, which has now found a haven in Oxford, was picked up by Browning for a lira (about eightpence), on a second-hand bookstall in the Piazza San Lorenzo at Florence, one June day, 1865.  Therein is set forth, in full detail, all the particulars of the murder of his wife Pompilia, for her supposed adultery, by a certain Count Guido Franceschini; and of that noble’s trial, sentence, and doom.  It is much the same subject matter as underlies the dramas of Webster, Ford, and other Elizabethan poets, but subtlety of insight rather than intensity of emotion and situation distinguishes the Victorian dramatist from his predecessors.  The story fascinated Browning, who, having in this book and elsewhere mastered all the details, conceived the idea of writing the history of the crime in a series of monodramatic revelations on the part of the individuals more or less directly concerned.  The more he considered the plan the more it shaped itself to a great accomplishment, and early in 1866 he began the most ambitious work of his life.

An enthusiastic admirer has spoken of the poem as “one of the most extraordinary feats of which we have any record in literature.”  But poetry is not mental gymnastics.  All this insistence upon “extraordinary feats” is to be deprecated:  it presents the poet as Hercules, not as Apollo:  in a word, it is not criticism.  The story is one of vulgar fraud and crime, romantic to us only because the incidents occurred in Italy, in the picturesque Rome and Arezzo of two centuries ago.  The old bourgeois couple, Pietro and Violante Comparini, manage to wed their thirteen-year-old putative daughter to a middle-aged noble of Arezzo.  They expect the exquisite repute of an aristocratic connection, and other tangible advantages.  He, impoverished as he is, looks for a splendid dowry.  No one thinks of the child-wife, Pompilia.  She becomes the scapegoat, when the gross selfishness of the contracting parties stands revealed.  Count Guido has a genius for domestic tyranny.  Pompilia suffers.  When she is about to become a mother she determines to leave her husband, whom she now dreads as well as dislikes.  Since the child is to be the inheritor of her parents’ wealth, she will not leave it to the tender mercies of Count Guido.  A young priest, a canon of Arezzo, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, helps her to escape.  In due course she gives birth to a son.  She has scarce time to learn the full sweetness of her maternity ere she is done to death like a trampled flower.  Guido, who has held himself thrall to an imperative patience, till his hold upon the child’s dowry should be secure, hires four assassins, and in the darkness of night betakes himself to Rome.  He and his accomplices enter the house of Pietro Comparini and his wife, and, not content with slaying them, also murders Pompilia.  But they are discovered, and Guido is caught red-handed.  Pompilia’s evidence alone is damnatory, for she