For our review threatens to become a catalogue.  To such a degree had mediaevalism become the fashion, that nearly every Georgian and Victorian poet of any pretensions tried his hand at it.  Robert Browning was not romantic in Scott’s way, nor in Tennyson’s.  His business was with the soul.  The picturesqueness of the external conditions in which soul was placed was a matter of indifference.  To-day was as good as yesterday.  Now and then occurs a title with romantic implications—­“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” e.g., borrowed from a ballad snatch sung by the Fool in “Lear” (Roland is Roland of the “Chanson").  But the poem proves to be a weird study in landscape symbolism and the history of some dark emprise, the real nature of which is altogether undiscoverable.  “Count Gismond,” again, is the story of a combat in the lists at Aix in Provence, in which a knight vindicates a lady’s honour with his lance, and slays her traducer at her feet.  But this is a dramatic monologue like any other, and only accidentally mediaeval.  “The Heretic’s Tragedy:  A Middle Age Interlude,” is mediaeval without being romantic.  It recounts the burning, at Paris, A.D. 1314, of Jacques du Bourg-Molay, Grand Master of the Templars; and purports to be a sort of canticle, with solo and chorus, composed two centuries after the event by a Flemish canon of Ypres, to be sung at hocktide and festivals.  The childishness and devout buffoonery of an old miracle play are imitated here, as in Swinburne’s “Masque of Queen Bersabe.”  This piece and “Holy Cross Day” are dramatic, or monodramatic, grotesques; and in their apprehension of this trait of the mediaeval mind are on a par with Hugo’s “Pas d’armes du Roi Jean” and “La Chasse du Burgrave.”  But Browning’s mousings in the Middle Ages after queer freaks of conscience or passion were occasional.  If any historical period, more than another, had special interest for him, it was the period of the Italian Renaissance.  Yet Ruskin said:  “Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages.”

Among Mrs. Browning’s poems, which, it needs hardly be said, are not prevailingly “Gothic,” there are three interesting experiments in ballad romance:  “The Romaunt of the Page,” “The Lay of the Brown Rosary,” and “The Rime of the Duchess May.”  In all of these she avails herself of the mediaeval atmosphere, simply to play variations on her favourite theme, the devotedness of woman’s love.  The motive is the same as in poems of modern life like “Bertha in the Lane” and “Aurora Leigh.”  The vehemence of this nobly gifted woman, her nervous and sometimes almost hysterical emotionalism, are not without a disagreeable quality.  With greater range and fervour, she had not the artistic poise of the Pre-Raphaelite poetess, Christina Rossetti.  In these romances, as elsewhere, she is sometimes shrill and often mannerised.  “The Romaunt of the Page” is the tale of a lady who attends her knight to the Holy Land, disguised as a page, and without his knowledge.  She saves his life several times, and finally at the cost of her own.  A prophetic accompaniment or burden comes in ever and anon in the distant chant of nuns over the dead abbess.