altogether.  He seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,—­Sardinia, Juliers, Lebanon; but actual historic research gradually yields ground to a free invention which, however, always simulates historic truth. King Victor and King Charles contains far less poetry than Paracelsus, but it was the fruit of historic studies no less severe.  There was material for genuine tragedy in the story.  The old king, who after fifty years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of his son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes, but, finding that Charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches angrily at his surrendered crown,—­this King Victor has something in him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV.  But history provided more sober issues, and Browning’s temperament habitually inclined him to stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle eddyings of thought and feeling.  Charles is no Regan, hardly even an Albany, no weakling either, but a man of sensitive conscience, who shifts and gyrates responsively to the complex play of motive which Browning brings to bear upon him.  Reluctantly he orders Victor’s arrest, and when the old man, baffled and exasperated, is brought before him and imperiously demands the crown, he puts it upon his father’s head.  Neither character is drawn with the power of Strafford, but the play is largely built upon the same contrasts between personal devotion and political expediency, the untutored idealism of youth and the ruses or rigidity of age.  This was a type of dramatic action which Browning imagined with peculiar power and insight, for it bodied forth a contrast between contending elements of his own nature.  Towards this type all his drama tended to gravitate.  In The Return of the Druses Browning’s native bent can be more freely studied, for history has contributed only the general situation.  His turn for curious and far-fetched incident is nowhere better illustrated than in this tangled intrigue carried on between Frankish Hospitallers, Venetians, and Druses of Lebanon in a lonely island of the Aegean where none of the three are at home.  A political revolution—­the revolt of the Druses against their Frankish lords—­provides the outer momentum of the action; but the central interest is concentrated upon a “Soul’s tragedy,” in which the conflict of races goes on within the perplexed and paralysed bosom of a single man.  Djabal, the Druse patriot brought up in Brittany, analyses his own character with the merciless self-consciousness of Browning himself: 

     “I with my Arab instinct—­thwarted ever
      By my Frank policy, and with in turn
      My Frank brain thwarted by my Arab heart—­
      While these remained in equipoise, I lived—­
      Nothing; had either been predominant,
      As a Frank schemer or an Arab mystic
      I had been something.”