artist in life—­a Meissonier of limited but flawless perfection in her unerring selection of means to ends.  In other words, this not very attractive pair struck Browning as another example of his familiar contrast between those who “try the low thing and leave it done,” and those who aim higher and fail.  Yet it must be owned that these Browningesque ideas are not thoroughly wrought into the substance of the poem; they are rather a sort of marginal embroidery woven on to a story which, as a whole, has neither been shaped by Browning’s hand nor vitalised with his breath.  Neither Clara nor Miranda can be compared in dramatic force with his great creations; even Clara’s harangue to the Cousinry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true rather to her generic character as the injured champion of her dead lord than to her individual variety of it—­the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet calculating devotion.  Miranda’s soliloquy before he throws himself from the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith surveying the motives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail.  Another symptom of decline in Browning’s most characteristic kind of power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests with an air of allegorical abstraction the “Tower” and the “Turf,” and makes the whole poem, with all its prosaic realism, intelligibly regarded as a sort of fantasia on self-indulgence and self-control.

The summer retreat of 1874 was found once more on the familiar north coast of France,—­this time at the quiet hamlet of Mers, near Treport.  In this lonely place, with scarcely a book at hand, he wrote the greater part of the most prodigally and exuberantly learned of all his poems—­Aristophanes’ Apology (published April 1875).  It was not Browning’s way to repeat his characters, but the story of Balaustion, the brilliant girl devotee of Euripides, had proved an admirable setting for his interpretations of Greek drama; and the charm of that earlier “most delightful of May-month amusements” was perhaps not the less easily revived in these weeks of constant companionship with a devoted woman-friend of his own.  Balaustion is herself full ten years older than at the time of her first adventure; her fresh girlish enthusiasm has ripened into the ardent conviction of intellectual maturity; she can not only cite Euripides, but vindicate his art against his mightiest assailant.  Situation, scenery, language, are here all more complex.  The first Adventure was almost Greek in its radiant and moving simplicity; the last is Titanically Browningesque, a riot of the least Hellenic elements of Browning’s mind with the uptorn fragments of the Hellenic world.  Moreover, the issue is far from being equally clear.  The glory of Euripides is still the ostensible theme; but Aristophanes had