THE POPE.  The reflections here imagined grow out of a double fact.  Innocent the Twelfth refused to shelter Count Franceschini with his accomplices from the judgment of the law, and thus assumed the responsibility of his death.  He had reached an age at which so heavy a responsibility could not be otherwise than painful.  As Mr. Browning depicts him, his decision is made.  From dawn to dark he has been studying the case, piecing together its fragmentary truths, trying its merits with “true sweat of soul.”  There is no doubt in his mind that Guido deserves to die.  But he has to nerve himself afresh before he gives the one stroke of his pen, the one touch to his bell, which shall send this soul into eternity; and that is what we see him doing.

As he says to himself, he is weighed down by years.  He lifts the cares of the whole world on a “loaded branch” for which a bird’s nest were a “superfluous burthen.”  Yet this strong man cries to him for life:  and he alone has the power to grant it.  How easy to reprieve!  How hard to deny to this trembling sinner the moment’s respite which may save his soul.  He wants precedent for such a deed; and he seeks it in the records of the Papacy.  It is from the Popes his predecessors that he must learn how to dare, to suffer, and—­to judge.  But these records tell him how Stephen cursed Formosus; how Romanus and Theodore reinstated the sanctity of Formosus and cursed Stephen; and how John reinstated Stephen and cursed Formosus.  They could not all be right.  There is no guarantee for infallibility—­no test of justice—­to be found here.

How, then, would he defend his condemnation of Guido if he himself were now summoned to the judgment-seat?  The question is self-answered:  no defence would be needed; for God sees into the heart.  He appraises the seed of act, which is its motive; not “leafage and branchage, vulgar eyes admire.”  The Pope knows that his motives will stand the scrutiny of God.  How, finally, could he plead his cause with a man like himself:  with the man Antonio Pignatelli, his very self?  He must, once for all, marshal the facts, and let them plead for him.

Next follows the Pope’s version of the story, which differs from those preceding it, in being the summing up of a spiritual judge, who deals not only with facts but with conditions, and who looks at the thing done, in its special reference to the person who did it.  As seen in this light, the blacks of the picture are blacker, the whites, whiter, than they appear from the ordinary point of view.  Guido has been doubly wicked because his birth, his breeding, and his connection with the Church, had surrounded him with incitements to good, and with opportunities for it.  Pompilia is doubly virtuous because she is a mere “chance-sown,” “cleft-nurtured” human weed, owing all her goodness to herself.  With Guido, the bad end is secured by the worst means.  Not satisfied to murder his wife, he must use a jagged