he has such a one before him—­has qualities of strength and inspiration which he cannot attain.  His wife might have incited him to nobler work; but Lucrezia is not the woman from whom such incentives proceed; she values her husband’s art for what it brings her.  Remorse has added itself in his soul to the sense of artistic failure.  He has not only abandoned the French Court, and, for Lucrezia’s sake, broken his promise to return to it; he has cheated his kind friend and patron, Francis I., of the money with which he was entrusted by him for the purchase of works of art.  He has allowed his parents to die of want.  All this, and more, reflects itself in the monologue he is addressing to his wife, but no conscious reproach is conveyed by it.  She has consented to sit by him at their window, with her hand in his, while he drinks in her beauty, and finds in it rest and inspiration at the same time.  She will leave him presently for one she cares for more; but the spell is deepening upon him.  The Fiesole hills are melting away in the twilight; the evening stillness is invading his whole soul.  He scarcely even desires to fight against the inevitable.  Yet there might be despair in his concluding words:  “another chance may be given to him in heaven, with Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael.  But he will still have Lucrezia, and therefore they will still conquer him.”

The facts adduced are all matter of history; though a later chronicle than that which Mr. Browning has used, is more favourable in its verdict on Andrea’s wife.

The fiercer emotions also play a part, though seldom an exclusive one, in Mr. Browning’s work.  Jealousy forms the subject of

     “THE LABORATORY.” ("Dramatic Lyrics.”  Published in “Dramatic
     Romances and Lyrics.” 1845.)[77]

     “MY LAST DUCHESS.” ("Dramatic Romances.”  Published as “Italy”
     in “Dramatic Lyrics.” 1842.)

The first of these shows the passion as distorted love:  the frenzy of a woman who has been supplanted.  The jealous wife (if wife she is) has come to the laboratory to obtain a dose of poison, which she means to administer to her rival; and she watches its preparation with an eager, ferocious joy, dashed only by the fear of its being inadequate.  The quantity is minute; and it is (as we guess) the “magnificent” strength of that other one which has won him away.

In the second we find a jealousy which has no love in it; which means the exactingness of self-love, and the tyranny of possession.  A widowed Duke of Ferrara is exhibiting the portrait of his former wife, to the envoy of some nobleman whose daughter he proposes to marry; and his comments on the countenance of his last Duchess plainly state what he will expect of her successor.  “That earnest, impassioned, and yet smiling glance went alike to everyone.  She who sent it, knew no distinction of things or persons.  Everything pleased her:  everyone could arouse her gratitude.  And it seemed to