The Inn Album is, like Red-cotton Night-cap Country, a versified novel, melodramatic in circumstances, frankly familiar in scenery and atmosphere.  Once more, as in the Blot in the ’Scutcheon, and in James Lee’s Wife, Browning turned for his “incidents in the development of souls” to the passion and sin-frayed lives of his own countrymen.  But no halo of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the sordid modernity of the facts; the “James Lee” of this tragedy appears in person and is drawn with remorseless insistence on every mean detail which announces the “rag-and-feather hero-sham.”  Everything except his wit and eloquence is sham and shabby in this Club-and-Country-house villain, who violates more signally than any figure in poetic literature the canon that the contriver of the tragic harms must not be totally despicable.  A thief, as Schiller said, can qualify for a tragic hero only by adding to his theft the more heroic crime of murder; but Browning’s Elder Man compromises even the professional perfidies of a Don Juan with shady dealings at cards and the like which Don Juan himself would have scouted.  In Fifine the Don Juan of tradition was lifted up into and haloed about with poetical splendours not his own; here he is depressed into an equally alien sorriness of prose.  But the decisive and commanding figure, for Browning and for his readers, is of course his victim and Nemesis, the Elder Lady.  She is as unlike Pompilia as he is unlike Guido; but we see not less clearly how the upleaping of the soul of womanhood in the child, under the stress of foul and cruel wrongs, has once more asserted its power over him.  And if Pompilia often recalls his wife, the situation of the Elder Lady may fairly remind us of that of Marion Erle in Aurora Leigh.  But many complexities in the working out mark Browning’s design.  The betrayed girl, scornfully refusing her betrayer’s tardy offer of marriage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of a clergyman, in the drudgery of a benighted parish.  The chance meeting of the two, four years after, in the inn parlour, their bitter confessions, through the veil of mutual hatred, that life has been ruined for both,—­he, with his scandalous successes growing at last notorious, she, the soul which once “sprang at love,” now sealed deliberately against beauty, and spent in preaching monstrous doctrines which neither they nor their savage parishioners believe nor observe,—­all this is imagined very powerfully and on lines which would hardly have occurred to any one else.

The Pacchiarotto volume forms a kind of epilogue to the work of the previous half-dozen years.  Since The Ring and the Book he had become a famous personage; his successive poems had been everywhere reviewed at length; a large public was genuinely interested in him, while a yet larger complained of his “obscurity,” but did not venture to ignore him, and gossiped eagerly about his private life.  He himself, mingling