This name is explained as follows:—­The story of the Franceschini case, as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed in the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring.  The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file; it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance.  The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged, and a pure gold ornament remains.  Mr. Browning’s material was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause.  It was too hard.  It was “pure crude fact,” secreted from the fluid being of the men and women whose experience it had formed.  In its existing state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it.  He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or—­as he also calls it—­of one fact more:  this fact being the echo of those past existences awakened within his own.  He breathed into the dead record the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognize in what he set before them unadulterated human truth.

All this was not effected at once.  The separate scenes of the Franceschini tragedy sprang to life in Mr. Browning’s imagination within a few hours of his reading the book.  He saw them re-enacted from his terrace at Casa Guidi on a sultry summer night—­every place and person projected, as it seemed, against the thundery sky—­but his mind did not yet weave them into a whole.  The drama lay by him and in him till the unconscious inspiration was complete; and then, one day in London, he felt what he thus describes:—­

       “A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb,
       And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair,
       Letting me have my will again with these....”
                                        (vol. viii. p. 32.)

and “The Ring and the Book” was born.  All this is told in an introductory chapter, which bears the title of the whole work; and here also Mr. Browning reviews those broad facts of the Franceschini case which are beyond dispute, and which constitute, so far as they go, the crude metal of his ring.  He has worked into this almost every incident which the chronicle supplies and his book requires no supplement.  But the fragmentary view of its contents, which I am reduced to giving, can only be held together by a previous outline of the story.