Berthold has a confidant, Melchior, a learned and thoughtful man, who is affectionately attached to the young prince, and who views with regret the easy worldly successes which neutralize his higher gifts.  Melchior has also appreciated the genuineness of Colombe’s nature, and conducted the last interview with Valence as one who desired that loyalty should be attested and love triumph.  He now turns to Berthold with what seems an appeal to his generosity.  But Berthold cannot afford to be generous.  As he reminds the happy bride before him he wants her duchy much more than she does.  He is, however, the sadder, and perhaps the wiser, for having found this out.

“Colombe’s Birthday” was performed in 1853, at the Haymarket Theatre; in 1853 or ’54, in the United States, at Boston.  The part of Colombe was taken, as had been those of Mildred Tresham and Lady Carlisle, by Miss Helen Faucit, now Lady Martin.

“A SOUL’S TRAGEDY” brings us near to the period of the “Men and Women;” and displays, for the first time in Mr. Browning’s work, a situation quite dramatic in itself, but which is nevertheless made by the characters, and imagined for them.  It is a story of moral retrogression; but, setting aside its very humorous treatment, it is no “tragedy” for the reader, because he has never believed in that particular “soul,” though its proprietor and his friends are justly supposed to do so.  The drama is divided into two acts, of which the first represents the “poetry,” the second the prose, of a certain Chiappino’s life.  The scene is Faenza; the time 15—.

Chiappino is best understood by comparison with Luitolfo, his fellow-townsman and friend.  Luitolfo has a gentle, genial nature; Chiappino, if we may judge him by his mood at the time of the action, an ill-conditioned one.  Luitolfo’s gentleness is allied to physical timidity, but his moral courage is always equal to the occasion.  Chiappino is a man more of words than of deeds, and wants both the courage and the rectitude which ill-conditioned people often possess.  Faenza is governed by a provost from Ravenna.  The present provost is a tyrant; and Chiappino has been agitating in a somewhat purposeless manner against him.  He has been fined for this several times, and is now sentenced to exile, and confiscation of all his goods.

Luitolfo has helped him until now by paying his fines; but this is an additional grievance to him, for he is in love with Eulalia, the woman whom his friend is going to marry, and declares that he has only refrained from urging his own suit, because he was bound by this pecuniary obligation not to do so.  He is not too delicate, however, to depreciate Luitolfo’s generosity, and generally run him down with the woman who is to be his wife; and this is what he is doing in the first scene, under cover of taking leave of her, and while her intended husband is interceding with the provost in his behalf.  A hurried knock, which they recognise as Luitolfo’s, gives a fresh impulse to his spite; and he begins sneering at the milk-and-watery manner in which Luitolfo has probably been pleading his cause, and the awful fright in which he has run home, on seeing that the provost “shrugged his shoulders” at the intercession.