In the autumn of 1844 Browning made a second tour to Italy.  It was chiefly memorable for his meeting, at Leghorn, with Edward John Trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of introduction;—­one who had not only himself “seen Shelley plain,” but has contributed more than any one else, save Hogg, to flash the unfading image of what he saw on the eyes of posterity.  The journey quickened and enriched his Italian memories; and left many vivid traces in the poetry of the following year.  Among these was the drama of Luria, ultimately published as the concluding number of the Bells.

In this remarkable drama Browning turned once more to the type of historical tragedy which he had originally essayed in Strafford.  The fall of a man of passionate fidelity through the treachery of the prince or the people in whom he has put his trust, was for Browning one of the most arresting of the great traditional motives of tragic drama.  He dwelt with emphasis upon this aspect of the fate of Charles’s great minister; in Luria, where he was working uncontrolled by historical authority, it is the fundamental theme.  At the same time the effect is heightened by those race contrasts which had been so abundantly used in The Return of the Druses.  Luria is a Moor who has undertaken the service of Florence, and whose religion it is to serve her.  Like Othello,[22] he has been intrusted, alien as he is, by a jealous and exacting State, with the supreme command of her military forces, a position in which the fervour of the Oriental and the frank simplicity of the soldier inevitably lie open to the subtle strategy of Italians and statesmen.  “Luria,” wrote Browning, while the whole scheme was “all in my brain yet, ... devotes himself to something he thinks Florence, and the old fortune follows, ... and I will soon loosen my Braccio and Puccio (a pale discontented man) and Tiburzio (the Pisan, good true fellow, this one), and Domizia the lady—­loosen all these on dear foolish (ravishing must his folly be) golden-hearted Luria, all these with their worldly wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways.”  Florence, in short, plays collectively somewhat the part of Iago to this second Othello, but of an Iago (need it be said) immeasurably less deeply rooted in malignity than Shakespeare’s.  It was a source of weakness as well as of strength in Browning as a dramatist that the evil things in men dissolve so readily under his scrutiny as if they were mere shells of flimsy disguise for the “soul of goodness” they contain.  He has, in fact, put so much strong sense on the side of the jealous Florentine masters of his hero that his own sympathies were divided, with paralysing effect, it would seem, upon his interest in drama.[23] Even the formidable antagonism of Braccio, the Florentine Commissary, is buttressed, if not based, upon a resolve to defend the rights of civilisation against militarism, of intellect against brute force.  “Brute force shall not rule Florence.”