But he presumed too much on his victory.  A famine had broken out in Siena.  The magistrates were, of course, held responsible for it.  The Bardotti assembled, and prescribed the fitting remedies.  Everything would come right if only the existing social order was turned topsy-turvy, and men were released from every tie.  Pacchiarotto was conspicuous by his eloquence.  But when he denounced the chief of the municipal force, and hinted that if the right man were in the right place, that officer would be he, all the other “spare horses” rushed upon him and he was obliged to run for his life.  The first hiding-place which presented itself was a sepulchre, in which a corpse had just been laid.  He squeezed himself into this, and crawled forth from it at at the end of two days, starving, covered with vermin, and thoroughly converted to the policy of living and letting live.  The authentic part of the narrative concludes with his admission into a neighbouring convent (the Osservanza) where he was cleansed and fed.  But Mr. Browning allows Fancy the just employment of telling how the Superior improved the occasion, and how his lesson was received.

“It is a great mistake,” this reverend person assures his guest—­though one from which his own youth has not been free—­“to imagine that any one man can preach another out of his folly.  If such endeavours could succeed, heaven would have begun on earth.  Whereas, every man’s task is to leaven earth with heaven, by working towards the end to which his Master points, without dreaming that he can ever attain it.  Man, in short, is to be not the ‘spare horse,’ but the ‘mill-horse’ plodding patiently round and round on the same spot.”

And Pacchiarotto replies that his monitor’s arguments are, by his own account, doomed to be ineffectual:  but that he is addressing himself to one already convinced.  He (Pacchiarotto) never was so by living man; but he has been convinced by a dead one.  That corpse has seemed to ask him by its grin, why he should join it before his time because men are not all made on the same pattern:  “Because, above, one’s Jack and one—­John.”  And the same grin has reminded him that this life is the rehearsal, not the real performance:  just an hour’s trial of who is fit, and who isn’t, to play his part; that the parts are distributed by the author, whose purpose will be explained in proper time; and that when his brother has been cast for a fool’s part, he is no sage who would persuade him to give it up.  He is now going back to his paint-pot, and will mind his own business in future.

By an easy transition, Mr. Browning turns the laugh against his own critics, whom he professes to recognize on this May morning, as flocking into his garden in the guise of sweeps.  He does not, he says, grudge them their fun or their one holiday of the year, the less so that their rattling and drumming may give him some inkling how music sounds; and he flings them, by way of a gift, the story he has just told, bidding them dance, and “dust” his “jacket” for a little while.  But that done, he bids them clear off, lest his housemaid should compel them to do so.  He has her authority for suspecting that in their professional character they bring more dirt into the house than they remove from it[92].